On the theory of time resolved near-resonance light scattering

Abstract

Time resolved resonance and near‐resonance light scattering is analyzed by means of Green’s operator formalism. We study the process of a photon wavepacket colliding with and scattered from a given molecule. Two decay components similar to those observed by Williams, Rousseau, and Dworetsky are obtained under appropriate conditions. Unlike other recent treatments of this problem, the light pulse is not treated as a pure quantum state (minimum uncertainty wavepacket) but rather as a mixture having characteristic time and energy profiles. It is shown that the nature of the light pulse may strongly influence the ratio of the short time to the long time decay intensities.