Enhancing single-molecule photostability by optical feedback from quantum-jump detection
Quantum Physics
2009-11-13 v1 Chemical Physics
Optics
Abstract
We report an optical technique that yields an enhancement of single-molecule photostability, by greatly suppressing photobleaching pathways which involve photoexcitation from the triplet state. This is accomplished by dynamically switching off the excitation laser when a quantum-jump of the molecule to the triplet state is optically detected. This procedure leads to a lengthened single-molecule observation time and an increased total number of detected photons. The resulting improvement in photostability unambiguously confirms the importance of photoexcitation from the triplet state in photobleaching dynamics, and may allow the investigation of new phenomena at the single-molecule level.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0707.3200,
title = {Enhancing single-molecule photostability by optical feedback from quantum-jump detection},
author = {Vincent Jacques and John Murray and François Marquier and Dominique Chauvat and Frédéric Grosshans and François Treussart and Jean-François Roch},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0707.3200},
year = {2009}
}