 As a consequence, singlet oxygen in the gas phase is relatively long lived (54-86 miliseconds), although interaction with solvents reduces the lifetime to microseconds or even nanoseconds.The higher 1Σ state is very short lived.In the gas phase, it relaxes primarily to the ground state triplet with a mean lifetime of 11.8 s. However in solvents such as CS2 and CCl4, it relaxes to the lower singlet 1Δg in milliseconds due to nonradiative decay channels.