Nonscaling displacement distributions as may be seen in fluorescence correlation spectroscopy

A continuous time random walk (CTRW) model with waiting times following the Lévy-stable distribution with exponential cutoff in equilibrium is a simple theoretical model giving rise to normal, yet non-Gaussian, diffusion. The distribution of the particles' displacements is explicitly time dependent and does not scale. Since fluorescent correlation spectroscopy (FCS) is often used to investigate diffusion processes, we discuss the influence of this lack of scaling on the possible outcome of the FCS measurements and calculate the FCS autocorrelation curves for such equilibrated CTRWs. The results show that although the deviations from Gaussian behavior may be detected when analyzing the short- and long-time asymptotic behavior of the corresponding curves, their bodies are still perfectly fitted by the fit forms used for normal diffusion. The diffusion coefficients obtained from the fits may however differ considerably from the true tracer diffusion coefficients as describing the time dependence of the mean squared displacement.