A wide range of possible FCS experiments involve chemical reactions that continually fluctuate from equilibrium because of thermal motions (and then "relax"). In contrast to diffusion, which is also a relaxation process, the fluctuations cause changes between states of different energies. One very simple system showing chemical relaxation would be a stationary binding site in the measurement volume, where particles only produce signal when bound (e.g. by FRET, or if the diffusion time is much faster than the sampling interval). In this case the autocorrelation is:
where
is the relaxation time and depends on the reaction kinetics (on and off rates), and:
is related to the equilibrium constant K.
Most systems with chemical relaxation also show measurable diffusion as well, and the autocorrelation function will depend on the details of the system. If the diffusion and chemical reaction are decoupled, the combined autocorrelation is the product of the chemical and diffusive autocorrelations.