Quantum process tomography of molecular dimers from two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy I: General theory and application to homodimers

Joel Yuen-Zhou, Alán Aspuru-Guzik

Published 2011-01-14Version 1

Is it possible to infer the time evolving quantum state of a multichromophoric system from a sequence of two-dimensional electronic spectra (2D-ES) as a function of waiting time? Here we provide a positive answer for a tractable model system: a coupled dimer. After exhaustively enumerating the Liouville pathways associated to each peak in the 2D-ES, we argue that by judiciously combining the information from a series of experiments varying the polarization and frequency components of the pulses, detailed information at the amplitude level about the input and output quantum states at the waiting time can be obtained. This possibility yields a quantum process tomography (QPT) of the single-exciton manifold, which completely characterizes the open quantum system dynamics through the reconstruction of the process matrix. This is the first of a series of two articles. In this manuscript, we specialize our results to the case of a homodimer, where we prove that signals stemming from coherence to population transfer and viceversa vanish upon isotropic averaging, and therefore, only a partial QPT is possible in this case. However, this fact simplifies the spectra, and it follows that only two polarization controlled experiments (and no pulse-shaping requirements) suffice to yield the elements of the process matrix which survive under isotropic averaging. The angle between the two site transition dipole moments is self-consistently obtained from the 2D-ES. Model calculations are presented, as well as an error analysis in terms of the angle between the dipoles and peak overlap. In the second article accompanying this study, we numerically exemplify the theory for heterodimers and carry out a detailed error analysis for such case. This investigation provides an important benchmark for more complex proposals of quantum process tomography (QPT) via multidimensional spectroscopic experiments.