Conclusion

Data taken through our own apparatus was plagued by high characteristic decay times. This can be attributed to the stickiness of the dye used, Rhodamine 6G. The molecules would stick to the glass and continue to fluoresce, causing the average time a particle spent diffusing through the beam to be much higher. If performed again, we would attempt to use a different dye that did not stick to the slides, such as Alexa 488, which would also require a different laser to excite it at the correct wavelength.

Through data taken on a setup with a confocal detection pinhole already in place, we demonstrated the effects of dilution on the autocorrelation function. We reproduced diffusion times for A488 and flourescent nanospheres within >4 sigma, possibly attributed to improper filtration of spheres or imprecise calculation of the excitation volume.