Laser pulse ultrafast

Figure 6.2 Steering of photochemical reactions by coherent control of ultrafast electron dynamics in molecules by shaped femtosecond laser pulses. Ultrafast excitation of electronic target states in molecules launches distinct nuclear dynamics, which eventually lead to specific outcomes of the photochemical reaction. The ability to switch efficiently between different electronic target channels, optimally achieved by turning only a single control knob on the control field, provides an enhanced flexibility in the triggering of photochemical events, such as fragmentation, excited state vibration, and isomerization.

ISBN 3-540-63900-4 (alk. paper) 1. Laser spectroscopy. 2. Laser pulses. Ultrafast. 3. Molecular dynamics. 4. Chemical kinetics. 5, Microclusters. I. Title. II. Series Springer tracts in modern physics 143. QC1.S797 vol. 143 [QC454.L3] 538 .6-dc2i 97-49030... 

Time-resolved fluorescence is perhaps the most direct experunent in the ultrafast spectroscopist s palette. Because only one laser pulse interacts with the sample, the mediod is essentially free of the problems with field-matter time orderings that arise in all of the subsequently discussed multipulse methods. The signal... 

Katzenellenbogen N and Grischkowsky D 1991 Efficient generation of 380 fs pulses of THz radiation by ultrafast laser pulse excitation of a biased metal-semiconductor interface Appl. Phys. Lett. 58 222-4... 

Fig. 4. Temporal pulse characteristics of lasers (a) millisecond laser pulse (b) relaxation oscillations (c) Q-switched pulse (d) mode-locked train of pulses, where Fis the distance between mirrors and i is the velocity of light for L = 37.5 cm, 2L j c = 2.5 ns (e) ultrafast (femtosecond or picosecond) pulse.

The purpose of this work is to demonstrate that the techniques of quantum control, which were developed originally to study atoms and molecules, can be applied to the solid state. Previous work considered a simple example, the asymmetric double quantum well (ADQW). Results for this system showed that both the wave paeket dynamics and the THz emission can be controlled with simple, experimentally feasible laser pulses. This work extends the previous results to superlattices and chirped superlattices. These systems are considerably more complicated, because their dynamic phase space is much larger. They also have potential applications as solid-state devices, such as ultrafast switches or detectors. 

Calculating the exact response of a semiconductor heterostructure to an ultrafast laser pulse poses a daunting challenge. Fortunately, several approximate methods have been developed that encompass most of the dominant physical effects. In this work a model Hamiltonian approach is adopted to make contact with previous advances in quantum control theory. This method can be systematically improved to obtain agreement with existing experimental results. One of the main goals of this research is to evaluate the validity of the model, and to discover the conditions under which it can be reliably applied. 

Time-resolved X-ray absorption is a very different class of experiments [5-7]. Chemical reactions are triggered by an ultrafast laser pulse, but the laser-induced change in geometry is observed by absorption rather than diffraction. This technique permits one to monitor local rather than global changes in the system. What one measures in practice is the extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS), and the X-ray extended nearedge strucmre (XANES). 

This chapter discusses the apphcation of femtosecond lasers to the study of the dynamics of molecular motion, and attempts to portray how a synergic combination of theory and experiment enables the interaction of matter with extremely short bursts of light, and the ultrafast processes that subsequently occur, to be understood in terms of fundamental quantum theory. This is illustrated through consideration of a hierarchy of laser-induced events in molecules in the gas phase and in clusters. A speculative conclusion forecasts developments in new laser techniques, highlighting how the exploitation of ever shorter laser pulses would permit the study and possible manipulation of the nuclear and electronic dynamics in molecules. 

For studies in molecular physics, several characteristics of ultrafast laser pulses are of crucial importance. A fundamental consequence of the short duration of femtosecond laser pulses is that they are not truly monochromatic. This is usually considered one of the defining characteristics of laser radiation, but it is only true for laser radiation with pulse durations of a nanosecond (0.000 000 001s, or a million femtoseconds) or longer. Because the duration of a femtosecond pulse is so precisely known, the time-energy uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics imposes an inherent imprecision in its frequency, or colour. Femtosecond pulses must also be coherent, that is the peaks of the waves at different frequencies must come into periodic alignment to construct the overall pulse shape and intensity. The result is that femtosecond laser pulses are built from a range of frequencies the shorter the pulse, the greater the number of frequencies that it supports, and vice versa. 

To determine molecular motions in real time necessitates the application of a time-ordered sequence of (at least) two ultrafast laser pulses to a molecular sample the first pulse provides the starting trigger to initiate a particular process, the break-up of a molecule, for example whilst the second pulse, time-delayed with respect to the first, probes the molecular evolution as a function of time. For isolated molecules in the gas phase, this approach was pioneered by the 1999 Nobel Laureate, A. H. Zewail of the California Institute of Technology. The nature of what is involved is most readily appreciated through an application, illustrated here for the photofragmentation of iodine bromide (IBr). 

Figure 1.3. Real-time femtosecond spectroscopy of molecules can be described in terms of optical transitions excited by ultrafast laser pulses between potential energy curves which indicate how different energy states of a molecule vary with interatomic distances. The example shown here is for the dissociation of iodine bromide (IBr). An initial pump laser excites a vertical transition from the potential curve of the lowest (ground) electronic state Vg to an excited state Vj. The fragmentation of IBr to form I + Br is described by quantum theory in terms of a wavepacket which either oscillates between the extremes of or crosses over onto the steeply repulsive potential V[ leading to dissociation, as indicated by the two arrows. These motions are monitored in the time domain by simultaneous absorption of two probe-pulse photons which, in this case, ionise the dissociating molecule.

For near-field imaging based on nonlinear or ultrafast spectroscopy, light pulses from a femtosecond Ti sapphire laser (pulse width ca. 100 fs, repetition rate ca. 

Since there are a large number of different experimental laser and detection systems that can be used for time-resolved resonance Raman experiments, we shall only focus our attention here on two common types of methods that are typically used to investigate chemical reactions. We shall first describe typical nanosecond TR spectroscopy instrumentation that can obtain spectra of intermediates from several nanoseconds to millisecond time scales by employing electronic control of the pnmp and probe laser systems to vary the time-delay between the pnmp and probe pnlses. We then describe typical ultrafast TR spectroscopy instrumentation that can be used to examine intermediates from the picosecond to several nanosecond time scales by controlling the optical path length difference between the pump and probe laser pulses. In some reaction systems, it is useful to utilize both types of laser systems to study the chemical reaction and intermediates of interest from the picosecond to the microsecond or millisecond time-scales. 

Ultrafast time-resolved resonance Raman (TR ) spectroscopy experiments need to consider the relationship of the laser pulse bandwidth to its temporal pulse width since the bandwidth of the laser should not be broader than the bandwidth of the Raman bands of interest. The change in energy versus the change in time Heisenberg uncertainty principle relationship can be applied to ultrafast laser pulses and the relationship between the spectral and temporal widths of ultrafast transform-limited Gaussian laser pulse can be expressed as... 

The characterization of the laser pulse widths can be done with commercial autocorrelators or by a variety of other methods that can be found in the ultrafast laser literature. " For example, we have found it convenient to find time zero delay between the pump and probe laser beams in picosecond TR experiments by using fluorescence depletion of trans-stilbene. In this method, the time zero was ascertained by varying the optical delay between the pump and probe beams to a position where the depletion of the stilbene fluorescence was halfway to the maximum fluorescence depletion by the probe laser. The accuracy of the time zero measurement was estimated to be +0.5ps for 1.5ps laser pulses. A typical cross correlation time between the pump and probe pulses can also be measured by the fluorescence depletion method. 

The advent of ultrafast pump-probe laser techniques62 and their marriage with the TOF method also enables study of internal ion-molecule reactions in clus-ters.21,63-69 The apparatus used in our experiments is a reflectron TOF mass spectrometer coupled with a femtosecond laser system. An overview of the laser system is shown in Figure 4. Femtosecond laser pulses are generated by a colliding pulse mode-locked (CPM) ring dye laser. The cavity consists of a gain jet, a... 

Note that the usage of 10-fs laser pulse leads to rich oscillatory components as well as these rapid kinetics in their pump-probe time-resolved profiles. Obviously in this timescale, the temperature T will have no meaning except for the initial condition before the pumping process. In addition, such oscillatory components may be due not only to vibrational coherence but also to electronic coherence. A challenging theoretical question may arise, for such a case, as to how one can describe these ultrafast processes theoretically. 

From the discussion presented in previous sections, vibrational relaxation (Appendix II) plays a very important role in the initial ET in photosynthetic RCs. This problem was first studied by Martin and co-workers [4] using Rb. capsulatas Dll. In this mutant, the ultrafast initial ET is suppressed and the ultrafast process taking place in the ps range is mainly due to vibrational relaxation. They have used the pumping laser at Xpump = 870 nm and probed at A.probe = 812 nm at 10 K. The laser pulse duration in this case is 80 fs. Their experimental results are shown in Fig. 16, where one can observe that the fs time-resolved spectra exhibit an oscillatory build-up. To analyze these results, we use the relation... 

G. Fibich, W. Ren, X-P. Wang, Numerical simulations of self-focusing of ultrafast laser pulses , Phys. Rev. E 67, 056603 (2003). 

The ultrafast laser pulse excites many vibrational modes of the metal carbonyl simultaneously (i.e., the vibrational modes are phase-coupled). Are the subsequent ligand motions coherent or do ultrafast dephasing processes hinder coherent motions ... 

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