Excited state preparation bright states

A bright state is prepared at t = 0. Lee and Heller (1979) derive a rigorous description of the wavepacket that is actually prepared when the excitation pulse is of finite duration. It is not a single eigenstate. It evolves in time subject to the spectroscopic time-independent Heff, as specified by the time-dependent Schrodinger equation Eq. (9.1.2). 

The concept of intramolecular vibrational energy redistribution (IVR) can be formulated from both time-dependent and time-independent viewpoints (Li et al., 1992 Sibert et al., 1984a). IVR is often viewed as an explicitly time-dependent phenomenon, in which a nonstationary superposition state, as described above, is initially prepared and evolves in time. Energy flows out of the initially excited zero-order mode, which may be localized in one part of the molecule, to other zero-order modes and, consequently, other parts of the molecule. However, delocalized zero-order modes are also possible. The nonstationary state initially prepared is often referred to as the bright state, as it carries oscillator strength for the spectroscopic transition of interest, and IVR results in the flow of amplitude into the manifold of so-called dark states that are not excited directly. It is of interest to understand what physical interactions couple different zero-order modes, allowing energy to flow between them. A particular type of superposition state that has received considerable study are A/-H local modes (overtones), where M is a heavy atom (Child and Halonen, 1984 Hayward and Henry, 1975 Watson et al., 1981). 

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