Quantum modeling of transient infrared spectra reflecting photoinduced electron-transfer dynamics

A theoretical description of transient vibrational spectra following the impulsive optical excitation of a molecular system is presented. The approach combines the nonsecular evaluation of the Redfield equations to describe the dissipative dynamics of the system with an efficient implementation of the doorway-window formalism to calculate optical pump/infrared probe (vis/IR) spectra. Both parts of the calculation scale with N2, thus facilitating the treatment of systems with a dimension up to 10(4). The formulation is applied to a simple model of photoinduced electron transfer, which takes into account two coupled electronic states and a single anharmonic vibrational mode. Despite its simplicity, the model is found to exhibit quite complex electronic and vibrational relaxation dynamics, which in turn give rise to rather complex time- and frequency-resolved vis/IR spectra. Interestingly, the calculated IR spectra of the electron-transfer system predict the appearance of novel vibronically induced sidebands, which may even dominate the spectrum at early times.