Quantum Jumps of a Single Molecule

With reference to the energy level scheme in Fig. 6, we expect the distribution of the fluorescence photons emitted by a single molecule to be composed of bright intervals 

In Fig. 13 we have plotted the distributions of interval lengths as derived from a trace with recording time of 26.8 s (see Fig. 12) for the situations when the molecule is in the singlet ( on times) or in the triplet manifold ( off times), respectively. These distributions allow the determination of the rates of the underlying processes [57, 65]. The distribution of on times was fitted by a single exponential while the data for the off times could be best approximated by a bi-exponential decay (see 

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Basche, T., Kummer, S. and Brauchle, C. Direct spectroscopic observation of quantum jumps of a single molecule, Nature, 373 (1995), 132-134... 

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