SUBJECT

Title

Femtochemistry

Type of instruction

lecture

Level

Master

Part of degree program
Credits

2

Recommended in

Semester 2

Typically offered in

Spring semester

Course description

The aim of the course is to acquire knowledge on the new field of Femtochemistry, understanding the concepts and methods that enable to study elementary chemical reactions at their inherent timescale of a few tens of femtoseconds.

The topics covered: Introductory topics: What is femtochemistry? Outline of the history of kinetics concerning time resolution and theories. Lasers, laser photolysis. Timescale in chemistry, especially in the 10¯18 - 10¯10 s domain. Specific problems in ultrafast laser pulse shaping. Elements of nonlinear optics: Basics of geometrical optics: mirrors, lenses, prisms, filaments. Wave optics: wave equations and their solutions for optical devices. Vector optics, polarization. Nonlinear optical phenomena: second and higher harmonics, self-phase modulation, self-focalisation, optical parametric amplifiers, Kerr lenses. Optical description of Gaussian beams. Lasers, pulsed lasers, semiconductor lasers, photodetectors. Generation and amplification of ultrafast laser pulses. Topics of femtochemistry: Spectral and temporal characteristics of laser pulses. Transform-limited pulses. Experiments using two and three laser pulses. Quantitative treatment of pump-probe measurements. Convolution in femtochemical detection. Deconvolution methods. Experimental study of unimolecular reactions using pump-probe techniques. Reconstruction of interatomic potentials. Studying molecular anisotropy. Initialising coherent bimolecular reactions using pump-probe techniques.

Readings

Compulsory literature*:

  • B. A. Saleh, M. C. Teich: Fundamentals of Photonics, John Wiley & Sons (1991)

Suggested literature:

  • Several actualised resources are also available at the website of the course that might change from one year to another.