Photobleaching of randomly rotating fluorescently decorated particles

Randomly rotating particles that have been isotropically labeled with rigidly linked fluorophores will undergo non-isotropic (patchy) photobleaching under illumination due to the dipole coupling of fluorophores with light. For a rotational diffusion rate D of the particle and a photobleaching time scale τ of the fluorophores, the dynamics of this process are characterized by the dimensionless combination Dτ. We find significant interparticle fluctuations at intermediate Dτ. These fluctuations vanish at both large and small Dτ or at small or large elapsed times t. Associated with these fluctuations between particles, we also observe transient non-monotonicities of the brightness of individual particles. These non-monotonicities can be as much as 20% of the original brightness. We show that these novel photobleach-fluctuations dominate over variability of single-fluorophore orientation when there are at least 10³ fluorophores on individual particles.