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Updated: Jun 25, 2026

Time-Resolved Fluorescence Anisotropy from Single Molecules for Characterizing Local Flexibility in Biomolecules
Published on: April 25, 2025
Theory for wavelength-resolved photon emission statistics in single-molecule fluorescence spectroscopy
1Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA.
Abstract:
We derive the moment generating function for photon emissions from a single molecule driven by laser excitation. The frequencies of the fluoresced photons are explicitly considered. Calculations are performed for the case of a two-level dye molecule, showing that measured photon statistics will display a strong and nonintuitive dependence on detector bandwidth. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the antibunching phenomenon, associated with negative values of Mandel's Q parameter, results from correlations between photons with well separated frequencies.
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