The effect of inhomogeneous broadening on optical strong field spectroscopy

Abstract

We show that a recent theory of strong field spectroscopy (SFS) [R. I. Cukier and M. Morillo, Phys. Rev. B 57, 6972 (1998), M. Morillo and R. I. Cukier, J. Chem. Phys. 110, 7966 (1999)] can be used to circumvent the effects of inhomogeneous broadening on this spectroscopy. In SFS, a strong external field is used to connect, with the transition dipole, two electronic states of a solute immersed in a medium. The electronic dephasing due to the medium is characterized via the power absorbed by the solute. The average absorbed power P̄(t) for resonant, strong fields exhibits an oscillatory decay in time, reflecting the finite change in the population difference of the electronic states and the dephasing arising from the coupling to the medium. The decay rate is characterized by d≡Δ2τc, where Δ and τc are, respectively, the strength and time constant of the correlation function characterizing the solute–medium coupling. The decay can be very rapid, on a 10–100 fs time scale, and this necessitates an indirect procedure to experimentally probe P̄(t) that we develop. For strong, off-resonance fields, P̄(t) returns to an exponential decay regime. The contrasting behavior of resonant and nonresonant strong fields can be used to avoid the loss of information about the homogeneous properties due to inhomogeneous broadening of the optical transition, when this broadening arises from inhomogeneity in the optical transition frequency.