Person:

Krich, Jacob Jonathan

The description of excited state dynamics in energy transfer systems constitutes a theoretical and experimental challenge in modern chemical physics. A spectroscopic protocol that systematically characterizes both coherent and dissipative processes of the probed chromophores is desired. Here, we show that a set of two-color photon-echo experiments performs quantum state tomography (QST) of the one-exciton manifold of a dimer by reconstructing its density matrix in real time. This possibility in turn allows for a complete description of excited state dynamics via quantum process tomography (QPT). Simulations of a noisy QPT experiment for an inhomogeneously broadened ensemble of model excitonic dimers show that the protocol distills rich information about dissipative excitonic dynamics, which appears nontrivially hidden in the signal monitored in single realizations of four-wave mixing experiments.

We report a conceptually straightforward witness that distinguishes coherent electronic oscillations from their vibronic-only counterparts in nonlinear optical spectra of molecular aggregates. Coherent oscillations as a function of waiting time in broadband pump/broadband probe spectra correspond to coherent electronic oscillations in the singly excited manifold. Oscillations in individual peaks of 2D electronic spectra do not necessarily yield this conclusion. Our witness is simpler to implement than quantum process tomography and potentially resolves a long-standing controversy on the character of oscillations in ultrafast spectra of photosynthetic light harvesting systems.

The origin of the coherences in two-dimensional spectroscopy of photosynthetic complexes remains disputed. Recently, it has been shown that in the ultrashort-pulse limit, oscillations in a frequency-integrated pump-probe signal correspond exclusively to electronic coherences, and thus such experiments can be used to form a test for electronic vs. vibrational oscillations in such systems. Here, we demonstrate a method for practically implementing such a test, whereby pump-probe signals are taken at several different pulse durations and used to extrapolate to the ultrashort-pulse limit. We present analytic and numerical results determining requirements for pulse durations and the optimal choice of pulse central frequency, which can be determined from an absorption spectrum. Our results suggest that for numerous systems, the required experiment could be implemented by many ultrafast spectroscopy laboratories using pulses of tens of femtoseconds in duration. Such experiments could resolve the standing debate over the nature of coherences in photosynthetic complexes.