Saturday, December 11, 2010

Resonant Raman basics

I am trying to get a better understanding of resonant raman scattering as a probe of properties of excited states of organic molecules. The figure below [taken from a JACS paper] shows how in the Green Flourescent Protein one sees an enhanced coupling to  vibrations [blue curve in lower panel].


There is a nice site on Resonant Raman Theory set up by Trevor Dines (University of Dundee). It emphasizes that in the Born-Oppenheimer approximation one only sees a significant signal when the excited state involves a displacement of the vibrational co-ordinate.
This raises a question about whether in a completely symmetric molecule one can have a resonant Raman signal due to effects that go beyond Born Oppenheimer.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Science job openings in sunny Brisbane, Australia

Bribie Island, just north of Brisbane. The University of Queensland has just advertised several jobs that may be of interest to readers of t...