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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik

MO 21: Posters 4: Novelties in Molecular Physics

MO 21.9: Poster

Thursday, March 26, 2015, 17:00–19:00, C/Foyer

Spectroscopic tracking of the primary visual event — •Jong Min Lim, Alex S Duarte, Giovanni Bassolino, Christoph Schnedermann, Torsten Wende, and Philipp Kukura — Physical & Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QZ, United Kingdom

The excited-state properties and kinetics of molecules can be extracted from ultrafast time-resolved electronic absorption or emission spectroscopy. It remains experimentally challenging, however, to obtain detailed information about the underlying structural and electronic changes immediately (<50 fs) after photon absorption, during which some of the most dramatic changes occur. To address these shortcomings, we have developed an ultra-sensitive transient absorption setup capable of simultaneously producing sub-10 fs pump pulses in the visible and dump pulses in the near-IR spectral region. We illustrate the benefits of such an approach by investigating the 11-cis to all-trans photoisomerization of rhodopsin and its chromophore in solution. We track transient absorption signal changes at long time-delays in the photoproduct spectral region as a function of pump-dump delay. Such measurements do not suffer from coherent artifact contributions commonly encountered in transient absorption and allow us to obtain critical information about the earliest dynamics of the system.