Tutorial

Interactive Tutorial

This page explains what Fisher information is, how the HILIGHTer precision figures of merit relate to it, and why gate design changes the trade-off between photon budget and useful information.

What This Teaches

Fisher information measures how strongly the measured timing distribution reacts when the lifetime changes. In this panel, the comparison shift is only a visual probe: it lets you compare the current lifetime against a nearby alternative so you can see how distinguishable the two hypotheses are.

IRF plus two nearby lifetime hypotheses

Where the information sits and how different the two curves are

What This Teaches

This section explains what the F-value means, why photon efficiency is F^-2, and how resolvability improves when you collect more photons.

Interactive Bars

F-value
Photon efficiency F^-2
Resolvability R

One-line Intuition

F tells you how much worse the precision is than the ideal case. F^-2 tells you what fraction of your photons are effectively useful. R tells you how easily the lifetime can be separated from noise at the current photon count.

What This Teaches

This section applies a Rayleigh-style criterion to lifetime measurements. The underlying decay model is a single exponential, but the measured lifetime estimates are shown as two Gaussian distributions whose width is controlled by F and the photon count.

Two Gaussian lifetime-estimate distributions

Fluorescence lifetime not resolved

What This Teaches

This panel compares two acquisition gates directly. It shows how much Fisher information each gate collects, how the two gates combine, and how sequential acquisition penalises the final F-value because the photons are split across two measurements.

Dirac IRF, decay curve, and the two gate windows

Fisher information captured by the two gates, with resulting F-value