Theoretical treatments of ultrafast electron transfer from adsorbed dye molecule to semiconductor nanocrystalline surface

In studying ultrafast electron transfer from a dye molecule to a nanosized semiconductor particle, pump-probe experiments are commonly used. In this system the electron transfer (ET) rate is faster than vibrational relaxation so that the ET rate should be described by a single-level rate constant and the probing signal (often in the form of time-resolved spectra) contains the contribution from the dynamics of both population and coherence (i.e., wave packet). In this paper, we shall present the theoretical treatments for femtosecond time-resolved pump-probe experiment and the dynamics of population and coherence by the density matrix method, and the calculation of single-level ET rate constant involved in a pump-probe experiment. As an application, we show the theoretical results using parameters extracted from experiments on a specific dye/semiconductor system. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.