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Direct measurement of fluorescence lifetime using high speed data acquisition

Olsson, Mattias LU (2018) EITM01 20171
Department of Electrical and Information Technology
Abstract
Time-correlated single photon counting (TCSPC) is commonly used to measure the lifetime of fluorescence from dye molecules. In TCSPC, the sample is excited by a pulsed laser and the arrival time of each of the emitted photons at the detector relative to a trigger is recorded. An important criterion of the technique is that the excitation intensity of the laser has to be low enough such that the detector detects at most one photon per ten laser pulse excitations. As one needs to detect about 10$^4$ to 10$^6$ photons in order to generate a time trace of the fluorescence, the measurement has to be repeated about 10$^7$ times, which makes the technique rather slow. A typical measurement takes about 1s which is very long when the fluorescence... (More)
Time-correlated single photon counting (TCSPC) is commonly used to measure the lifetime of fluorescence from dye molecules. In TCSPC, the sample is excited by a pulsed laser and the arrival time of each of the emitted photons at the detector relative to a trigger is recorded. An important criterion of the technique is that the excitation intensity of the laser has to be low enough such that the detector detects at most one photon per ten laser pulse excitations. As one needs to detect about 10$^4$ to 10$^6$ photons in order to generate a time trace of the fluorescence, the measurement has to be repeated about 10$^7$ times, which makes the technique rather slow. A typical measurement takes about 1s which is very long when the fluorescence lifetimes of most of the dye molecules range from few nanoseconds to microseconds. In this master's thesis, a novel method based on interleaved sampling and waveform averaging to directly measure the fluorescence decay from the dye molecule Rhodamine 6G is presented. A new algorithm using boot-strapped waveform averaging to improve the effective sampling rate as well as the signal to noise ratio of the digitized signal have been implemented and tested. The new algorithm has enabled us to reduce the measurement time to a few tens of a microseconds, which is approximately a million times faster than the TCSPC method. (Less)
Popular Abstract
Boot-strapped waveform averaging (BSWA) is a technique that improves the way repetitive signals are processed.
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author
Olsson, Mattias LU
supervisor
organization
course
EITM01 20171
year
type
H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
subject
keywords
Boot-strapped waveform averaging, fluorescence lifetimes, TCSPC, repetitive signal
report number
LU/LTH-EIT 2018-627
language
English
id
8940574
date added to LUP
2018-06-01 14:57:10
date last changed
2018-06-01 14:57:10
@misc{8940574,
  abstract     = {{Time-correlated single photon counting (TCSPC) is commonly used to measure the lifetime of fluorescence from dye molecules. In TCSPC, the sample is excited by a pulsed laser and the arrival time of each of the emitted photons at the detector relative to a trigger is recorded. An important criterion of the technique is that the excitation intensity of the laser has to be low enough such that the detector detects at most one photon per ten laser pulse excitations. As one needs to detect about 10$^4$ to 10$^6$ photons in order to generate a time trace of the fluorescence, the measurement has to be repeated about 10$^7$ times, which makes the technique rather slow. A typical measurement takes about 1s which is very long when the fluorescence lifetimes of most of the dye molecules range from few nanoseconds to microseconds. In this master's thesis, a novel method based on interleaved sampling and waveform averaging to directly measure the fluorescence decay from the dye molecule Rhodamine 6G is presented. A new algorithm using boot-strapped waveform averaging to improve the effective sampling rate as well as the signal to noise ratio of the digitized signal have been implemented and tested. The new algorithm has enabled us to reduce the measurement time to a few tens of a microseconds, which is approximately a million times faster than the TCSPC method.}},
  author       = {{Olsson, Mattias}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Direct measurement of fluorescence lifetime using high speed data acquisition}},
  year         = {{2018}},
}