Studies of chemical and physical processes with picosecond lasers

Abstract

One of the basic questions in chemistry today is concerned with the degradation of energy in a molecular system. The time dependent redistribution of energy between the various degrees of freedom'within a molecule on excitation to some excited state and the interactions and energy exchange of the excited molecule with surrounding molecules and external fields is of fundamental importance to a description of molecular phenomena. It is the completion between the various dissipative pathways which determines whether light is emitted or nonradiative physical and chemical processes dominate in the degradation of energy by the molecules of interest Studies of these processes in the picosecond time domain brings new insight of these decay mechanisms since the competitive channeling of energy is often determined on this time scale.