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The economy of photons

Improved and easy-to-implement methods for precise fitting of curves to Poisson-distributed data—such as photons from single emitters—reach the limits of fitting precision.

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Figure 1: The spatial resolution of a light microscope can be increased about tenfold by accurately fitting a curve to the point spread function image of a single fluorophore such as GFP (compare the outer dotted line to the inner dotted line).

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Correspondence to Daniel R Larson.

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Larson, D. The economy of photons. Nat Methods 7, 357–359 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth0510-357

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