A theoretical study of sum-frequency generation for chiral solutions near electronic resonance

Abstract

We present a method of calculating sum-frequency generation (SFG) for chiral solutions near electronic resonance including the vibronic contributions, which give reasonable SFG intensities and show the Franck–Condon progressions for SFG. When studying R-1,1′-bi-2-naphthol (R-BN), we found that the calculated spectrum is in good agreement with the experimental one (Phys. Rev. Lett., 2001, 87, 113001). Then we apply this method to investigate SFG for chiral arabinose solutions. Theoretical results show that it may be difficult to observe the corresponding SFG even when the sum-frequency is exactly in resonance with the low-lying excited electronic states. Furthermore, we discuss the reason why SFG of chiral arabinose solutions is small.