Study of water using ultrafast lasers

Abstract

Some of the peculiar phenomena occurring in the aqueous solutions have been studied using an ultrafast laser. It is observed that the dynamics of the intramolecular charge transfer process is markedly retarded when the probe solute is transferred from bulk water to the interior of various hydrophobic aggregates. Solvation dynamics of water molecules in various organized and biological environments is found to be more than thousand times slower than that in ordinary water. Lastly, several processes occurring at the water surface have been studied using the novel surface second harmonic generation technique.