Related papers: Direct detection of single molecules by optical ab…
Optical detection and spectroscopy of single molecules has become an indispensable tool in biological imaging and sensing. Its success is based on fluorescence of organic dye molecules under carefully engineered laser illumination. In this…
Room temperature detection of single quantum emitters has had a broad impact in fields ranging from biophysics to material science, photophysics, or even quantum optics. These experiments have exclusively relied on the efficient detection…
Absorption microscopy is a powerful technique, enabling the detection of single non- fluorescent molecules at room temperature. So far, the molecular absorption has been probed optically via the attenuation of a probing laser. The…
Single dye molecules at cryogenic temperatures display many spectroscopic phenomena known from free atoms and are thus promising candidates for fundamental quantum optical studies. However, the existing techniques for the detection of…
We propose a new method to measure the absolute photon absorption cross section of neutral molecules in a molecular beam. It is independent of our knowledge of the particle beam density, nor does it rely on photo-induced fragmentation or…
Current optical detection schemes for single molecules require light absorption, either to produce fluorescence or direct absorption signals. This severely limits the range of molecules that can be detected, because most molecules are…
Single-molecule fluorescence spectroscopy is a powerful method that avoids ensemble averaging, but its temporal resolution is limited by the fluorescence lifetime to nanoseconds at most. At the ensemble level, two-dimensional spectroscopy…
The detection of single molecules has facilitated many advances in life- and material-sciences. Commonly, it founds on the fluorescence detection of single molecules, which are for example attached to the structures under study. For…
Photothermal microscopy has recently complemented single molecule fluorescence microscopy by the detection of individual nano-objects in absorption. Photothermal techniques gain their superior sensitivity by exploiting a heat induced…
Molecule-surface interaction is key to many physical and chemical processes at interfaces. Here, we show that the dynamics of single molecules on a surface under ultrahigh vacuum can be resolved using fluorescence imaging. By adapting…
In the realm of fundamental quantum science and technologies, non-classical states of light, such as single-photon Fock states, are widely studied. However, current standards and metrological procedures are not optimized for low light…
The development of single-photon sources has been nothing but rapid in recent years, with quantum emitter-based systems showing especially impressive progress. In this article, we give an overview of the developments in single-photon…
Over the last decade, single-molecule optical microscopy has become the gold-standard approach to decipher complex molecular processes in cellular environments. [1-3] Single-molecule fluorescence microscopy has several advantages such as…
Single molecule spectroscopy aims at unveiling often hidden but potentially very important contributions of single entities to a system's ensemble response. Albeit contributing tremendously to our ever growing understanding of molecular…
Isolating single molecules in the solid state has allowed fundamental experiments in basic and applied sciences. When cooled down to liquid helium temperature, certain molecules show transition lines, that are tens of megahertz wide,…
Enhanced optical absorption of molecules in the vicinity of metallic nanostructures is key to a number of surface-enhanced spectroscopies and of great general interest to the fields of plasmonics and nano-optics. Yet, experimental access to…
The long spin coherence times in ambient conditions of color centers in solids, such as nitrogen-vacancy (NV$^{-}$) centers in diamond, make these systems attractive candidates for quantum sensing. Quantum sensing provides remarkable…
Current single-molecule imaging techniques are incapable of providing stochastic information of individual chemical reactions. We have developed an optical imaging method for stochastic analysis of individual electrochemical reactions. The…
Photothermal spectroscopy and microscopy provides a route to measure the spectral and spatial properties of individual nanoscopic absorbers, independent from scattering, extinction, and emission. The approach relies upon use of two light…
Exploring the interaction of light and matter at the ultimate limit of single photons and single emitters is of great interest both from a fundamental point of view and for emerging applications in quantum engineering. However, the…