Calculating time-resolved differential absorbance spectra for ultrafast pump-probe experiments with surface hopping trajectories.

Abstract

We report a surface hopping approach for modeling the full time- and frequency-resolved differential absorbance spectra (beyond the inhomogenous limit) obtained in ultrafast pump-probe experiments. In our approach, we combine dynamical information obtained from ensembles of classical trajectories propagated on the ground and on the excited potential energy surfaces to directly calculate optical response functions and hence spectral lineshapes. We demonstrate that our method is exact for the model problem of two shifted harmonic potentials with identical harmonic frequencies in the absence of electronic relaxation. We then consider a model three state system with electronic relaxation and show that our method is able to capture the effects of nonadiabatic excited state dynamics on the time-dependent differential absorbance spectra. Furthermore, by comparing our spectra against those spectra calculated with either an (1) inhomogenous expression, (2) ground-state Kubo theory, or (3) excited-state Kubo theory, we show that including dynamical information from both the ground and excited potential energy surfaces significantly improves the reliability of the semiclassical approximations. As such, our surface hopping method should find immediate use in modeling the time-dependent differential abosrbance spectra of ultrafast pump-probe experiments.