@phdthesis{Schott2018,
  author    = {Schott, Sebastian},
  title     = {Identification of trihalide photodissociation patterns by global vibrational wavepacket analysis of broadband magic-angle transient absorption data},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-159677},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t W{\"u}rzburg},
  year      = {2018},
  abstract  = {The invention of laser pulse shapers allowed for various quantum control experiments, where a chemical reaction is guided by specifically tailored laser pulses. However, despite of the prominent role of the liquid phase in chemistry, no successful attempt for controlling the selectivity of a bond-fission reaction has yet been reported in this state of matter. Promising candidates for such an experiment are C\$_{\infty\mathrm{v}}\$-symmetric trihalide anions with two different chemical bonds like \$\ce{I2Cl-}\$, because these molecules notionally offer the most simplest selectivity-control scenario of breaking either the one or the other bond and they are expected to dissociate under ultraviolet (UV) irradiation like it is known for the most-studied trihalide \$\ce{I3-}\$. In order to investigate in this thesis the possibility that the dissociation reaction of such trihalides branches into two different photofragments, the ultrafast photodissociation dynamics of \$\ce{I3-}\$, \$\ce{Br3-}\$, \$\ce{IBr2-}\$ and \$\ce{ICl2-}\$ (point group D\$_{\infty\mathrm{h}}\$) as well as of \$\ce{I2Br-}\$ and \$\ce{I2Cl-}\$ (point group C\$_{\infty\mathrm{v}}\$) in dichloromethane solution were measured with broadband transient absorption spectroscopy in magic-angle configuration. The identification of the reaction pathway(s) relies on vibrational wavepacket oscillations, which survive the dissociation process and therefore carry not only informations about the reactant trihalides but also about the fragment dihalides. These characteristic vibrational wavenumbers were extracted from the measured transient absorption spectra by globally fitting the population dynamics together with the wavepacket dynamics. Until recently, such a combined model function was not available in the well-established fitting tool Glotaran. This made it inevitable to develop a custom implementation of the underlying variable-projection fitting algorithm, for which the computer-algebra software Mathematica was chosen. Mathematica's sophisticated built-in functions allow not only for a high flexibility in constructing arbitrary model functions, but also offer the possibility to automatically calculate the derivative(s) of a model function. This allows the fitting procedure to use the exact Jacobian matrix instead of approximating it with the finite difference method. Against the expectation, only one of the two thinkable photodissociation channels was found for each of the investigated C\$_{\infty\mathrm{v}}\$ trihalides. Since the photofragments recombine, their absorption signal as well as the reactant ground state bleach recover. This happens in a biexponential manner, which in the case of \$\ce{I3-}\$ was interpreted by Ruhman and coworkers with the direct formation of a neutral dihalogen fragment \$\ce{I2}\$ beside the negatively charged dihalide fragment \$\ce{I2-}\$. In this thesis, such a direct reaction channel was not found and instead the fast component of the biexponential decay is explained with vibrational excess energy mediating the recombination-preceding electron transfer process \$\ce{I2- + I -> I2 + I-}\$, while the slow component is attributed to cooled-down fragments. In addition to the trihalide experiments, the possibility of a magic-angle configuration for polarization-shaping control experiments was theoretically investigated in this thesis by deriving magic-angle conditions for the third-order electric-dipole response signal of arbitrarily polarized laser pulses. Furthermore, the subtleties of anisotropy signals violating the well-known range of \numrange{-0.2}{0.4} were studied.},
  subject      = {Femtosekundenspektroskopie},
  language  = {en}
}