Abstract

In transient spectroscopy, the time resolution is usually limited by the pulse width or the rise time of light sources or equivalent perturbers. In the extremely short time region, its improvement becomes severe even with the recent development of femtosecond techniques. We propose here a new method of transient spectroscopy for which the time resolution is limited only by the correlation time τ_c of light sources, which is generally much shorter than the light duration. A temporally incoherent light has a short τ_c corresponding to the reciprocal bandwidth and appears like a single pulse of duration in the autocorrelation measurement. This kind of light is therefore expected to play essentially the same role as a short pulse in nonlinear spectroscopy utilizing correlation techniques.

© 1984 Optical Society of America