Figure 6.

System and FRET transition rates as functions of the number of photons used for analysis. To produce these plots using the same kinetic parameters as in Fig. 5. Next, we analyzed the data considering only the first 12,500 photons and then increased the photon budget by a factor of two for each subsequent analysis. Furthermore, we generated 9000 MCMC samples for each analysis to compute statistical quantities. In (a), we show two plots corresponding to the two system transition rates $\left({\lambda }_{esc}\right)$. The blue dots represent the median values (50% quantile), and the ends of the attached confidence intervals represent 5 and 95% quantiles. The ground truths are shown with red horizontal lines. We show similar plots for FRET transition rates $\left({\lambda }_{FRET}\right)$ in (b). In all of the plots, we see that, as the photon budget is increased, the confidence intervals shrink (the posterior gets narrower/sharper). With a budget of 400,000 photons, the confidence intervals represent less than 10% error in the estimates and contain the ground truths in all of the plots.