Low-Light Photodetectors for Fluorescence Microscopy

Over the years, fluorescence microscopy has evolved and become a necessary element of life science studies. Microscopy elucidated biological processes in live cells organisms, also enabled tracking biomolecules real time. Development highly sensitive photodetectors light sources, addition to evolution various illumination methods fluorophores, helped acquire single-molecule sensitivity, enabling imaging detection. Low-light used are classified into two categories: point wide-field photodetectors. Although photodetectors, notably photomultiplier tubes (PMTs), have been commonly laser scanning (LSM) with confocal setup, such as electron-multiplying charge-coupled devices (EMCCDs) scientific complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (sCMOS) cameras imaging. This review focuses on former low-light presents their applications recent progress. These include conventional PMTs, single photon avalanche diodes (SPADs), hybrid (HPDs), newly emerging silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) (also known multi-pixel counters (MPPCs)) superconducting nanowire detectors (SSPDs). In particular, this shows distinctive features HPD application