Fundamental precision limits of fluorescence microscopy: a perspective on MINFLUX.

Over the past years, fluorescence microscopy (FM) has steadily progressed in increasing the localization precision of fluorescent emitters in biological samples and led to new claims, whose rigorous validation remains an outstanding problem. We present a novel, to the best of our knowledge, multi-parameter estimation framework that captures the full complexity of a single-emitter FM localization experiment. We showcase our method with Minimum Flux (MINFLUX) microscopy, among the highest-resolution approaches, demonstrating that (i) the localization precision can be increased only by turning the illumination intensity up, thus increasing the risk of photo-bleaching, and it is independent from the beams' separation, and (ii) in presence of background noise, the localization precision decreases with the beams' separation.

Author Correction: Narrow bounds for the quantum capacity of thermal attenuators.

The original version of this Article contained an error in Equation (40). The numerator of the fraction inside the logarithm was missing an overall minus sign. This has been corrected in the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.

Narrow bounds for the quantum capacity of thermal attenuators.

Thermal attenuator channels model the decoherence of quantum systems interacting with a thermal bath, e.g., a two-level system subject to thermal noise and an electromagnetic signal traveling through a fiber or in free-space.