Birks speculated that the loss of linearity is due to recombination and quenching effects between the excited molecules and the surrounding substrate. Birks' law has mostly been tested for organic scintillators. Its applicability to inorganic scintillators is debated. A good discussion can be found in Particle Detectors at Accelerators: Organic scintillators. A compilation of Birks' constant for various materials can be found in Semi-empirical calculation of quenching factors for ions in scintillators. A more complete theory of scintillation saturation, that gives Birks' law when only unimolecular de-excitation is included, can be found in a paper by Blanc, Cambou, and De Laford.