Time Correlation of Single-Molecule Emission Signal

Time correlation of single-molecule emission signal 

The decay in the autocorrelation of the emitted photons for pentacene in p-terphenyl due to the triplet bottleneck was first reported by Orrit et al. [3], and this 

Turning now to the nanosecond time regime (lower half of Fig. 11), the emitted photons from a single molecule can provide still more useful information. On the time scale of the excited state lifetime, the statistics of photon emission from a single quantum system are expected [84] to show photon antibunching, which means that the photons space themselves out in time , that is, the probability for two photons to arrive at the detector at the same time is small. This is a uniquely quantvun-mechanical effect, which was first observed for Na atoms in a low-density beam [85]. Antibunching is fundamentally measured by computing the second-order correlation of the electric field (r) (whieh is simply the normalized form of the intensity- 

Study of the shape of the correlation function in the ns time regime has been used to determine both T and Ti for a single terrylene molecule in p-terphenyl [87]. 

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