Extracting molecular responses from ultrafast charge dynamics at material interfaces

Abstract

We introduce a new data analysis method, which can be applied to transient vibrational sum-frequency generation spectroscopy to reveal hidden molecular dynamics of charge transfer at molecular heterojunction interfaces. After validating the method, we used it to extract molecular dynamics at organic semiconductor/metal interfaces, which was otherwise dominated by electronic dynamics. Such an ability can advance the understanding of the roles of molecules in interfacial charge transfer dynamics.