Transient absorption spectroscopy setup

Fig. 12 Experimental setup for femtosecond (pump probe) transient absorption spectroscopy.

Abstract The concepts at the basis of transient absorption measurements were illustrated with particular reference to nanosecond kinetic spectrophotometry and femtosecond pump and probe methods. The main features of the typical experimental setups for both techniques were illustrated as regards optical parts, geometrical layout of components and light detection systems. Examples of application of transient absorption spectroscopy were illustrated for the elucidation of photoinduced processes in supramolecular systems like a fullerenepyrrolidine-oligophenyleneethynylene hybrid derivative, a drug-protein complex and a tri-chromophoric system consisting of two porphyrins and one perylene bisimide. 

Fig. 3. Pump-deplete-probe spectroscopy on lycopene in hexane, a) Experimental setup After excitation and depletion of Car S2 with a delay of r=50fs, a white-light probe pulse at delay tprob<.=2ps measures the transient absorption spectrum, b) Spectra without (solid curve) and with depletion pulse (dotted) and their difference (shaded area). Only the Car Si state is depleted the ground state bleach (S0-S2) and positive absorption feature on its low energy side (hotSo-S2) are unaffected.

The rotational reorientation times of the sample in several solvents at room temperature were measured by picosecond time-resolved fluorescence and absorption depolarization spectroscopy. Details of our experimental setups were described elsewhere. For the time-correlated single photon counting measurement of which the response time is a ut 40 ps, the sample solution was excited with a second harmonics of a femtosecond Ti sapphire laser (370 nm) and the fluorescence polarized parallel and perpendicular to the direction of the excitation pulse polarization as well as the magic angle one were monitored. The second harmonics of the rhodamine-640 dye laser (313 nm 10 ps FWHM) was used to raesisure the polarized transient absorption spectra. The synthesis of the sample is given elsewhere. All the solvents of spectro-grade were used without further purification. 

Such FPA detector setups were first used by the group of Lauterbach for the parallel characterization of solid samples and the product gas stream from catalytic reactors [18,19]. These authors also changed the mode of operation from the previously used step-scan mode to the rapid scan mode which made it possible to even record transient processes [20,21]. The group of Lauterbach was also the first to apply FPA IR spectroscopy to a problem from zeolite science, even if it was only in form of a feasibility study. They investigated the adsorption of CO on Cu-ZSM-5 and on Pt/Si02 in order to prove that it would be possible to detect the absorption bands of adsorbed species [19J. Since experiments were carried out at room temperature, bands for CO on the Cu-ZSM-5 would be expected to have very low intensity, and indeed, no spectra for CO on this solid were shown. The band of CO on the noble metal, on the other hand, could clearly be detected without problems, and a signal-to-noise ratio not much different from that obtained for a conventional experiment. 

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