Condensed phases system-bath interactions

It is known that the interaction of the reactants with the medium plays an important role in the processes occurring in the condensed phase. This interaction may be separated into two parts (1) the interaction with the degrees of freedom of the medium which, together with the intramolecular degrees of freedom, represent the reactive modes of the system, and (2) the interaction between the reactive and nonreactive modes. The latter play the role of the thermal bath. The interaction with the thermal bath leads to the relaxation of the energy in the reaction system. Furthermore, as a result of this interaction, the motion along the reactive modes is a complicated function of time and, on average, has stochastic character. 

The book covers a variety of questions related to orientational mobility of polar and nonpolar molecules in condensed phases, including orientational states and phase transitions in low-dimensional lattice systems and the theory of molecular vibrations interacting both with each other and with a solid-state heat bath. Special attention is given to simple models which permit analytical solutions and provide a qualitative insight into physical phenomena. 

It has been found that the short-range interaction model can be applied to study the vibrational relaxation of molecules in condensed phases. This model is applied to treat vibrational relaxation and pure dephasing in condensed phases. For this purpose, the secular approximation is employed to Eq. (129). This assumption allows one to focus on several important system-heat bath induced processes such as the vibrational population transition processes, the vibrational coherence transfer processes, and the vibronic processes. 

As has been discussed above, molecular clusters produced in a supersonic expansion are preferred model systems to study solvation-mediated photoreactions from a molecular point of view. Under such conditions, intramolecular electron transfer reactions in D-A molecules, traditionally observed in solutions, are amenable to a detailed spectroscopic study. One should note, however, the difference between the possible energy dissipation processes in jet-cooled clusters and in solution. Since molecular clusters are produced in the gas phase under collision-free conditions, they are free of perturbations from many-body interactions or macro-molecular structures inherent for molecules in the condensed phase. In addition, they are frozen out in their minimum energy conformations which may differ from those relevant at room temperature. Another important aspect of the condensed phase is its role as a heat bath. Thus, excess energy in a molecule may be dissipated to the bulk on a picosecond time-scale. On the other hand, in a cluster excess energy may only be dissipated to a restricted number of oscillators and the cluster may fragment by losing solvent molecules. 

---