Monte Carlo simulations of triplet-state photophysics for super-resolution imaging of fluorophore-labeled gold nanorods

Super-resolution imaging has previously been used to identify the position of individual fluorescently-labeled DNA molecules bound to the surface of gold nanorods. In order to isolate and fit emission from individual fluorophores, a stochastic photoswitching technique based on shelving the fluorophores into triplet states is used. However, the reconstructed super-resolution images of the fluorescently-labeled gold nanorods are consistently smaller than the expected size of the gold nanorod supports. Here, Monte Carlo simulations are used to probe how smaller-than-expected reconstructed images may be obtained by simultaneous emission events based on short triplet state lifetimes and/or a high density of fluorescently-labeled DNA on the gold nanorod surface.