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The Journal of Chemical Physics

Limitations on measuring solvent motion with ultrafast transient hole burning

Tai Jong Kang, Jongwan Yu, Mark A. Berg

Published Feb 15, 1991• 53 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A number of limitations to hole burning in the liquid phase are identified. As spectral diffusion becomes more rapid, a point is reached where the narrowest hole width no longer measures the homogeneous linewidth. Spectral congestion of the solute is also shown to limit the fastest detectable spectral diffusion rate. An optimal pulse length is found which allows observation of the most rapid spectral diffusion. In addition, the coherence effect observed when the pulses overlap is shown to have resonances at both the excited and ground state vibrational spacings. The coherence effect greatly resembles the hole burning spectrum, but contains no dynamical information. Because of these limitations, hole burning may not be observed even when the homogeneous spectrum is well resolved and spectral diffusion is slow. Experimental confirmation is found in the hole burning spectrum of iodine in hexane, which shows no hole burning despite having a narrow homogeneous linewidth.

DOI
10.1063/1.459865

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A number of limitations to hole burning in the liquid phase are identified. As spectral diffusion becomes more rapid, a point is reached where the narrowest hole width no longer measures the homogeneous linewidth. Spectral congestion of the solute is also shown to limit the fastest detectable spectral diffusion rate. An optimal pulse length is found which allows observation of the most rapid spectral diffusion. In addition, the coherence effect observed when the pulses overlap is shown to have resonances at both the excited and ground state vibrational spacings. The coherence effect greatly resembles the hole burning spectrum, but contains no dynamical information. Because of these limitations, hole burning may not be observed even when the homogeneous spectrum is well resolved and spectral diffusion is slow. Experimental confirmation is found in the hole burning spectrum of iodine in hexane, which shows no hole burning despite having a narrow homogeneous linewidth.
Theory based on a configuration coordinate model is presented to clarify solute–solvent relaxation effect on the line shape of a time-resolved hole-burning spectrum. The time-resolved hole-burning spectrum is affected by both a hole created in a ground-state population and an excess excited-state population. The solute–solvent relaxation causes thermalization in both populations and then the shift and broadening of the spectrum is expected observable. The line shapes of three typical cases are mainly considered: (1) The excited state is assumed to have an infinitely long lifetime; (2) the excited state has a finite lifetime, the population being assumed to relax toward an electronic state other than the ground state, and (3) the population created in the excited state relaxes to the ground state, where a hole-filling effect is taken into account. Results obtained by numerical calculations show that a time evolution of the ground-state hole is clearly observed when the low-energy tail of the absorption band is excited under the condition that the population decay to the other electronic state is very fast. Further, it is predicted that the hole-filling effect causes a considerable deformation of the spectral shape when the solvent relaxation rate is comparable to the excited-state population decay rate.
Laser induced hole burning in optical absorption bands of low temperature solids has been investigated with emphasis on mechanisms for population hole burning, the interactions with the environment which limit the hole widths and the use of hole burning for ultra high resolution spectroscopy. Hole burning was observed in a wide range of solids including organic and organometallic molecules in crystals and rare earth ions in crystals and glasses. The mechanisms for hole burning also varied widely and a new mechanism involving optically induced nuclear spin flips of near neighbor nuclei was discovered. Examples of hole burning in new classes of materials are presented here for the first time, namely inorganic glasses (silicate glasses containing Nd(3+), Pr(3+) or Eu(3+)) and undoped stoichiometric compounds (e.g., EuP5O14). Hole recovery was used to determine nuclear spin lattice relaxation rates in praseodymium doped crystals. For allowed optical transitions (e.g., singlet states of zinc porphyrin, dibromoindigo and color centers in alkali halides) the hole widths at 2K are limited by population decay to approximately 50 MHz. For longer lived optical levels in crystalline materials, e.g., those containing rare earth ions, the hole widths are narrower (less than 10 MHz) and are limited by dynamical interactions with surrounding nuclei. In amorphous materials such as europium doped silicate glass, hole widths are much broader, being limited by low frequency tunneling motions. Hole burning measurements were complemented by time domain coherent transient (photon echo, and optical free decay) measurements of homogeneous linewidths which enabled us to measure optical resonances as narrow as 760 Hz in Eu(3+):Y2O3.
With high-efficiency fluorescence excitation techniques optical spectra of single impurity molecules of perylene in a polyethylene matrix can be obtained at 1.5 K. Analysis of such spectra shows a variety of spectral diffusion effects, including fast (<2 s) resonance frequency changes on the 1–100-MHz scale, which lead to a range of apparent linewidths, as well as discontinuous jumps in the resonance frequency of 10–1000 MHz on a longer time scale. In addition, light-induced changes in the resonance frequency of a single molecule (persistent spectral hole burning) have been conclusively observed by showing that the burning time decreases with increased laser power. Surprisingly, hole-burned single molecules often spontaneously return to the original frequency in 1–100 s. Measurements of the burning time for a large number of hole-burning events for the same single molecule yield an exponential burn-time distribution, which is the first direct measurement to our knowledge of the stochastic kinetics of a single molecule. Analysis of the signal-to-noise function appropriate to these experiments gives the conditions under which other systems may permit single-molecule detection: strong absorption, high fluorescence yield, weak bottlenecks in the optical pumping process, and low hole-burning quantum efficiency.
A model calculation is presented that describes the features of spectral-hole burning measurements performed under conditions of femtosecond transient excitation and probing. Pump-induced changes in the spectrum of probe transmittance arise not only from changes in level population (hole burning), but also from the presence of pump polarization during the probe, and from perturbations of the decay of the probe polarization. These latter effects give rise to oscillating differential transmittance spectra when the (shorter) probe pulse arrives prior to the peak of the pump noise. Only when the probe pulse follows the bulk of the pump pulse does the level population effect dominate the spectrum, so that one can observe dynamic hole-burning effects without distortion.>
At very low temperatures, the spread in the different environments of matrix embedded dye molecules results in an inhomogeneously broadened S1 ← S0 band. Spectroscopic techniques based on the appearence of optical zero phonon lines, such as fluorescence line narrowing, spectral hole-burning, and single molecule spectroscopy provide an experimental resolution limited by the homogeneous linewidth. From the investigation of the homogeneous line width as a function of different parameters (time, temperature) information on the guest host interactions responsible for the observed linewidth is obtained. Spectrally narrow features are extremely sensitive probes for external perturbations, such as electric fields, magnetic fields, or hydrostatic pressure.