Nanophotonics offers a promising range of applications spanning from the development of efficient solar cells to quantum communications and biosensing. However, the ability to efficiently couple fluorescent emitters with nanostructured materials requires one to probe light–matter interactions at a subwavelength resolution, which remains experimentally challenging. Here, we introduce an approach to perform super-resolved fluorescence lifetime measurements on samples that are densely labeled with photo-activatable fluorescent molecules. The simultaneous measurement of the position and the decay rate of the molecules provides direct access to the local density of states (LDOS) at the nanoscale. We experimentally demonstrate the performance of the technique by studying the LDOS variations induced in the near field of a silver nanowire, and we show via a Cramér–Rao analysis that the proposed experimental setup enables a single-molecule localization precision of 6 nm.

中文翻译：

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用单分子寿命成像探测近场光-物质相互作用

纳米光子学具有广阔的应用前景，从高效太阳能电池的开发到量子通信和生物传感。但是，有效地将荧光发射体与纳米结构材料耦合的能力要求以亚波长分辨率探测光与物质的相互作用，这在实验上仍然具有挑战性。在这里，我们介绍了一种方法，该方法对被光激活荧光分子密集标记的样品进行超分辨荧光寿命测量。同时测量分子的位置和衰减速率可直接访问纳米级的局部态密度（LDOS）。我们通过研究在银纳米线的近场中引起的LDOS变化，实验性地证明了该技术的性能，