Introduction to the Theory of Fluorescence Intensity Distribution Analysis

Abstract

The primary data of a fluorescence correlation experiment is a sequence of photon counts detected from a microscopic sample volume. An essential component of the fluorescence correlation analysis is the calculation of the second order autocorrelation function of detected photons. In this way a stochastic function of photon counts is transformed into a statistical function having an expected shape from which properties of the sample can be estimated. The calculation of the autocorrelation function, however, is not the only way to extract information about the sample from the sequence of photon counts. Another approach, based on collecting the distribution of the number of photon counts for a given time interval, was introduced into fluorescence fluctuation spectroscopy by Qian and lson in 1990 [19.1].