Abstract
Optical imaging using fluorescent markers is a commonly used technique in biology. Using the effects of the interactions between fluorescent molecules and the environment on the dynamical properties of the emitters is an exciting possibility to open a way of providing an efficient local probe in complex media. In particular, the decay rate of the fluorescent emitters depends on the environment, and could serve as such a local probe. The cover picture illustrates theoretical advances in this field, presented in the Editor's Choice article by Froufe‐Pérez and Carminati (p. 1258), which show that the statistical distribution of the decay rate of an emitter surrounded by a random distribution of absorbing nanoparticles depends on the dynamics of the emitter and the surrounding nanoparticles, as well as the absorption characteristics of the latter. Hence, measuring the statistics of emission decay rates could allow us to obtain relevant information about the emitter and the surrounding medium at short distances. The cover picture is an artistic view of the process of fluorescent emission of a single emitter immersed in a random cluster of nanoparticles, giving rise to two different statistical distributions of decay rates.
The first author, L. S. Froufe‐Pérez, started to work on the theoretical aspects of light emission in complex and disordered systems in 2006 and is currently a member of the Photonic Crystals group at the Materials Science Institute of Madrid. The corresponding author Rémi Carminati is full professor at the 'Photons and Matter' laboratory of ESPCI in Paris. (© 2008 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)