Fluorescence pattern recognition for ultrasensitive molecule identification: comparison of experimental data and theoretical approximations

A concept taken from information theory is applied to ultrasensitive fluorescence detection and identification of molecules. The theoretical misidentification probability is compared to the experimental error probability. It is found that 350 photons are sufficient to distinguish dye molecules with nearly identical absorption and emission properties but with different fluorescence lifetimes with an accuracy of 1 misidentification in 104 experiments. Thus we demonstrate the experimental usefulness of the Kullback-Leibler minimum discrimination information for the identification of molecules.