No abstract

Broadband optical pump and compressed white light continuum probe were used to measure the transient excited-state absorption, ground-state bleach, and stimulated emission signals of cresyl violet solution in methanol. Amplitude oscillations caused by wavepacket motion in the ground and excited electronic states were analyzed. It was found that vibrational coherences in the excited state persist for more than the experimental waiting time window of 6 ps, and the strongest mode had a dephasing time constant of 2.4 ps. We hypothesize the dephasing of the wavepacket in the excited state is predominantly caused by intramolecular vibrational relaxation (IVR). Slow IVR indicates weak mode-mode coupling and therefore weak anharmonicity of the potential of this vibration. Thus, the initially prepared vibrational wavepacket in the excited state is not significantly perturbed by nonadiabatic coupling to other electronic states, and hence the diabatic and adiabatic representations of the system are essentially identical within the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. The wavepacket therefore evolves with time in an almost harmonic potential, slowly dephased by IVR and the pure vibrational decoherence. The consistency in the position of node (phase change in the wavepacket) in the excited-state absorption and stimulated emission signals without undergoing any frequency shift until the wavepacket is completely dephased conforms to the absence of any reactive internal conversion.

Photoinduced electron transfer (ET) is a cornerstone of energy transduction from light to chemistry. The past decade has seen tremendous advances in the possible role of quantum coherent effects in the light-initiated energy and ET processes in chemical, biological, and materials systems. The prevalence of such coherence effects holds a promise to increase the efficiency and robustness of transport even in the face of energetic or structural disorder. A primary motive of this Perspective is to work out how to think about “coherence” in ET reactions. We will discuss how the interplay of basic parameters governing ET reactionslike electronic coupling, interactions with the environment, and intramolecular high-frequency quantum vibrationsimpact coherences. This includes revisiting the insights from the seminal work on the theory of ET and time-resolved measurements on coherent dynamics to explore the role of coherences in ET reactions. We conclude by suggesting that in addition to optical spectroscopies, validating the functional role of coherences would require simultaneous mapping of correlated electron motion and atomically resolved nuclear structure.

Ultrafast excited-state relaxation dynamics of a nonlinear optical (NLO) dye, (S)-(-)-1-(4-nitrophenyl)-2-pyrrolidinemethanol (NPP), was carried out under the regime of femtosecond fluorescence up-conversion measurements in augmentation with quantum chemical calculations. The primary concern was to trace the relaxation pathways which guide the depletion of the first singlet excited state upon photoexcitation, in such a way that it is virtually nonfluorescent. Ground- and excited-state (singlet and triplet) potential energy surfaces were calculated as a function of the -NO(2) torsional coordinate, which revealed the perpendicular orientation of -NO(2) in the excited state relative to the planar ground-state conformation. The fluorescence transients in the femtosecond regime show biexponential decay behavior. The first time component of a few hundred femtoseconds was ascribed to the ultrafast twisted intramolecular charge transfer (TICT). The occurrence of charge transfer (CT) is substantiated by the large dipole moment change during excitation. The construction of intensity- and area-normalized time-resolved emission spectra (TRES and TRANES) of NPP in acetonitrile exhibited a two-state emission on behalf of decay of the locally excited (LE) state and rise of the CT state with a Stokes shift of 2000 cm(-1) over a time scale of 1 ps. The second time component of a few picoseconds is attributed to the intersystem crossing (isc). In highly polar solvents both the processes occur on a much faster time scale compared to that in nonpolar solvents, credited to the differential stability of energy states in different polarity solvents. The shape of frontier molecular orbitals in the excited state dictates the shift of electron density from the phenyl ring to the -NO(2) group and is attributed to the charge-transfer process taking place in the molecule. The viscosity dependence of relaxation dynamics augments the proposition of considering the -NO(2) group torsional motion as the main excited-state relaxation coordinate.

Broadband transient absorption and two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy (2DES) studies of methylene blue in aqueous solution are reported. By isolating the coherent oscillations of the nonlinear signal amplitude and Fourier transforming with respect to the population time, we analyzed a significant number of coherences in the frequency domain and compared them with predictions of the vibronic spectrum from density function theory (DFT) calculations. We show here that such a comparison enables reliable assignments of vibrational coherences to particular vibrational modes, with their constituent combination bands and overtones also being identified via Franck–Condon analysis aided by DFT. Evaluation of the Fourier transform (FT) spectrum of transient absorption recorded to picosecond population times, in coincidence with 2D oscillation maps that disperse the FT spectrum into the additional excitation axis, is shown to be a complementary approach toward detailed coherence determination. Using the Franck–Condon overlap integrals determined from DFT calculations, we modeled 2D oscillation maps up to two vibrational quanta in the ground and excited state (six-level model), showing agreement with experiment. This semiquantitative analysis is used to interpret the geometry change upon photoexcitation as an expansion of the central sulfur/nitrogen containing ring due to the increased antibonding character in the excited state.