Liisa Hirvonen edited Results: Events.tex  almost 9 years ago

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\subsection{Event recognition and overlapping events}  Typical single photon events detected with the EBCCD are shown in Fig~\ref{fig1}c,d. The central peak is high with small wings -- wings:  during the diffusion of the electrons from the back of the sensor to the front, the charge spills over into adjacent pixels, although the pixel’s full well capacity is not reached. Brighter, larger ion events are also detected, caused by a photoelectron hitting a gas molecule in the imperfect vacuum inside the EBCCD tube, leading to the gas molecule being ionised and accelerated towards the photocathode (Fig~\ref{fig1}c,d, top). The ion events cause problems with event recognition algorithms that find a threshold for each frame separately: the high brightness causes the threshold to be set too high and the photon events discarded as noise. The raw data was therefore preprocessed using ImageJ's tools by setting the intensity of all bright pixels in the ion events to a grey value slightly above the maximum intensity of the photons events. The ion events are then incorrectly localised as photon events, but due to the relatively rare occurrence of ion events compared to photon events (around 1 ion event per 600 photon events) this does not have a noticeable effect on the results.  For the MR processing, the enabling of MFA with a maximum of 2 molcules per fitting region introduces a bias into the algorithm that it should anticipate detecting 2 photon events per fitting region. This can initially cause single photon events to be over-resolved into multiple events. The occasions where single events are over-resolved is counteracted by the remove duplicates function; as the over-resolved detection markers are withinnanometres of each other (within  the same pixel) pixel,  the excess marker can be removed whilst not affecting correctly-resolved overlapping events, events  which are of the order of micrometres typically further  apart.