Abstract

The importance of water as a universal and unique solvent for chemical and biological reactions has continued to stimulate theoretical, computational, and experimental efforts on understanding the structure and dynamics of liquid water. Liquid water has a broad absorption band in the 3μm region due to its fundamental stretching vibrations which are particularly sensitive to its hydrogen binding structure. Graener et al have originated picosecond hole burning experiments on liquid water in this spectral region and revealed the inhomogeneous nature of the hydrogen bonding structures (Ref. 1) Femtosecond coherent experiments would be particularly informative about the vibrational dephasing and other dynamical properties of the system. A 50fs pulse at 3μm is needed in order to coherently excite the entire inhomogeneously broadened band. However, this has been experimentally difficult due to the lack of femtosecond source in this spectral region.

© 1994 Optical Society of America