Recovery of underlying distributions of lifetimes from fluorescence decay data

Abstract Fluorescence decay curves exhibiting good deconvolution fits to two or three exponentials can be interpreted in terms of two or three distinct lifetimes or as the result of complex underlying distributions which are not evident because of statistical noise. This work deals with the recovery of complex distributions of lifetimes from single photon decay data through the use of an exponential series probe function with fixed lifetimes and variable pre-exponential coefficients.