Theory, Modeling and Evaluation of Single-Molecule Measurements

Single-molecule measurements provide much more than conventional experiments on ensembles, and the data they generate are of a qualitatively different kind. Noise, fluctuations, irreproducible events can crop, distort, or obscure measurements, but at the same time play a central part in the generation and interpretation of the signals, and provide qualitatively new insights. The desire to understand and exploit more exhaustively and more reliably single-molecule data is stimulating novel theoretical and statistical approaches, which in turn are spawning a broad variety of new questions and experimental methods. A large body of literature has appeared over the last 10 years and has vigorously grown in the past few years. To name a few of the mathematical tools applied to single-molecule data, work theorems have been proven for single-molecule force measurements, Lévy statistics were found in the analysis of blinking traces of molecules and semiconductor nanocrystals, maximum entropy methods are applied to the determination of fluorescence lifetimes and of their fluctuations, Markov chains help unravel complex reaction pathways of biomolecules, and the generating function formalism has prevailed as the general framework connecting density matrix approaches with multi-event probabilities. The time is now ripe for a comprehensive overview and comparison of the various theories and numerical treatments applied to single-molecule data.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together prominent contributors, both theorists and experimentalists, to develop a community of language and approaches in this exciting new field. Several of the workshop speakers will be authors of chapters of a book scheduled to appear in 2007, and a significant part of the workshop will be devoted to discussion between the authors to harmonize their contributions, adopt common viewpoints and notations, and reduce overlaps. By laying the foundations of an emerging field in a book’s form, the workshop is hoped to be of

service to a broad community spanning chemical physics, material science, nanoscience, and life sciences.

This will be an open workshop. We invite all our colleagues, in particular those in the Netherlands, to participate. We specifically encourage participation by junior scientists. The number of potential participants is limited only by the capacity and availability of funds. Please, note that the registration fee will be 100 Euro (50 Euro for students). The invited speakers (about 20 of them) will be chosen among well-established contributors to the field. Keynote speakers (5 of them) will be asked to present a generally accessible overview of the corresponding research area.

Organizers Prof. E. Barkai, Bar-Ilan (Israel) barkaie@mail.biu.ac.il Prof. F. L. H. Brown, UC Santa Barbara (USA) flbrown@chem.ucsb.edu Prof. H. Yang, UC Berkeley (USA)  hawyang@berkeley.edu Prof. M. Orrit, Leiden (Netherlands) orrit@molphys.leidenuniv.nl