Articles you may be interested inComparison between optical nonlinearity relaxation times from coherent secondharmonic generation and from incoherent hyperRayleigh scattering Influence of solvation on the ionization potential of metal clusters AIP Conf. Proc. 298, 541 (1994); 10.1063/1.45414Tracer diffusion in polymer and organic liquids close to the glass transition AIP Conf.We propose a new method for analysis of nonmonotonic forced Rayleigh scattering ͑FRS͒ decay profiles. It is shown that the curvature near the local maximum of a decay-grow-decay profile or a grow-decay profile can be used to determine directly the geometric mean of the unperturbed and photoproduct diffusion coefficients, which will in many cases mitigate the need to apply multiparameter nonlinear fitting routines. FRS tracer-diffusion measurements of methyl red in poly͑vinyl acetate͒/toluene solutions at two different probe wavelengths, analyzed using the new method, are in good agreement with results of previous studies. Simulations are used to estimate the systematic error due to the approximation employed, and it is concluded that accuracies of a few percent or better should be routinely achievable in most cases. We have, in addition, investigated the probe-wavelength dependence of the profile shape for this system.