Related papers: Direct detection of single molecules by optical ab…
Single fluorescent molecules, behaving as ideal electric dipole emitters, are powerful nanoscopic probes of complex optical fields. Here, this property is exploited to precisely map the polarization and vectorial structure of tightly…
Coherent control, a central concept in physics and chemistry, has sparked significant interest due to its ability to fine-tune interference effects in atoms and individual molecules for applications ranging from light-harvesting complexes…
Detecting light is fundamental to all optical experiments and applications. At the single photon level, the quantised nature of light requires specialised detectors, which typically saturate for more than one photon, rendering the…
More than twenty years ago, scientists succeeded in pushing the limits of optical detection to single molecules using fluorescence. This breakthrough has revolutionized biophysical measurements, but restrictions in photophysics and labeling…
Many optical measurement techniques, such as light scattering from wavelength-scale particles or detecting motion from a surface with an optical lever, encode information in a complex radiation pattern. Extracting all available information…
We discuss implications of a recent experimental breakthrough which uses a fluorescence-doped flexible semiconducting polymer to construct a single-molecule sensor which can detect ultra-weak forces in the molecular environment, with a grey…
In the past 40 years, single-molecule techniques have been rapidly developed and widely applied in numerous fields of biology researches, offering new insights that conventional biochemical assays cannot discover. In this review, to help…
Optical fluorescence imaging is capable of measuring both the spatial and rotational dynamics of single molecules. However, unavoidable measurement noise will result in inaccurate estimates of rotational dynamics, causing a molecule to…
We consider the free carrier dispersion effect in a semiconductor nanocavity in the limit of discrete photoexcited electron-hole pairs. This analysis reveals the possibility of ultrafast, incoherent transduction and gain from a single…
We demonstrate a scheme for direct absorption imaging of an ultracold ground-state polar molecular gas near quantum degeneracy. A challenge in imaging molecules is the lack of closed optical cycling transitions. Our technique relies on…
We report on the triggered generation of indistinguishable photons by solid-state single-photon sources in two separate cryogenic laser scanning microscopes. Organic fluorescent molecules were used as emitters and investigated by means of…
The technologies of heating, photovoltaics, water photocatalysis and artificial photosynthesis depend on the absorption of light and novel approaches such as coherent absorption from a standing wave promise total dissipation of energy.…
We demonstrate a robust fiber-optics-based fluorescence detector, fully integrated on an atom chip, which detects single atoms propagating in a guide with 66% efficiency. We characterize the detector performance and the atom flux by…
Absorption spectroscopy is a fundamental tool for probing molecular structure. However, performing absorption spectroscopy on individual molecules is challenging due to the low signal-to-noise ratio. Here, we report on a nondestructive…
Temporal-spectral modes of light provide a fundamental window into the nature of atomic and molecular systems and offer robust means for information encoding. Methods to precisely characterize the temporal-spectral state of light at the…
We propose a new class of bosonic dark matter (DM) detectors based on resonant absorption onto a gas of small polyatomic molecules. Bosonic DM acts on the molecules as a narrow-band perturbation, like an intense but weakly coupled laser.…
Single-molecule biophysics has transformed our understanding of the fundamental molecular processes involved in living biological systems, but also of the fascinating physics of life. Far more exotic than a collection of exemplars of soft…
Single-molecule tracking is a powerful way to look at the dynamic organization of plasma membranes. However, there are some limitations to its use. For example, it was recently observed, using numerical simulation, that time-averaging…
Direct detection experiments have started to explore dark matter scattering off electrons and nucleons through light mediators. Mediators with sub-keV masses are efficiently produced in the Sun and can be absorbed in the same detectors that…
The molecular dark state participates in many important photon-induced processes, yet is typically beyond the optical-spectroscopic measurement due to the forbidden transition dictated by the selection rule. In this work, we propose to use…