TY - JOUR A1 - Boltz, Horst-Holger A1 - Sirbu, Alexei A1 - Stelzer, Nina A1 - Lohse, Martin J. A1 - Schütte, Christof A1 - Annibale, Paolo T1 - Quantitative spectroscopy of single molecule interaction times T2 - Optic Letters N2 - Single molecule fluorescence tracking provides information at nanometer-scale and millisecond-temporal resolution about the dynamics and interaction of individual molecules in a biological environment. While the dynamic behavior of isolated molecules can be characterized well, the quantitative insight is more limited when interactions between two indistinguishable molecules occur. We address this aspect by developing a theoretical foundation for a spectroscopy of interaction times, i.e., the inference of interaction from imaging data. A non-trivial crossover between a power law to an exponential behavior of the distribution of the interaction times is highlighted, together with the dependence of the exponential term upon the microscopic reaction affinity. Our approach is validated with simulated and experimental datasets. Y1 - 2021 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-zib/frontdoor/index/index/docId/7958 VL - 46 IS - 7 SP - 1538 EP - 1541 ER -