We report the first observation of photon echoes in an organic mixed crystal. The echo was observed after excitation with a nitrogen-laser-pumped dye laser in the $^{1}B_{2\mathrm{u}}\ensuremath{\leftarrow}^{1}A_{g}$ electronic transition at 3739.9 \AA{} of pyrene in biphenyl at 2 K. The photon-echo excitation spectrum of the origin (zero-phonon line) region shows that drastic variations occur in the coherence lifetime of sites which, qua incoherent (fluorescent) decay, are indistinguishable.
We present a theoretical framework for the calculation of photon-yield spectra from radiative-cascade decays of photoexcited helium atoms in a static electric field for incident photon energies below the first (
N=1) ionization threshold. The present theory takes full account of the singlet-triplet mixing among the singly excited states with principal quantum numbers $n\ensuremath{\lesssim}10$. The model predicts the enhancement of transition probabilities to triplet final states due to the field-induced mixing. In particular, for a field strength of 9.17 kV/cm, polarization of incident photons perpendicular to the field, and a 4 meV broad excitation function tuned to the
1s6p1P states, the $1s6\ensuremath{\ell}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}1s2p\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}{}^{3}\phantom{\rule{-0.16em}{0ex}}P$ and $1s5\ensuremath{\ell}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}1s2p\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}{}^{3}\phantom{\rule{-0.16em}{0ex}}P$ emitted photon yields are predicted to be about 70 times and 20 times lower, respectively, than the photon yields for transitions to the corresponding singlet final states.