Investigations of heme protein absorption line shapes, vibrational relaxation, and resonance raman scattering on ultrafast time scales

The flow of photoexcitation energy in biomolecules is investigated. It is demonstrated that a dynamically evolving absorption band leads directly to a time dependent complex line shape function and REP, which must be considered along with the Bose-Einstein factor when attempting to extract a time dependent vibrational temperature from picosecond resonance raman data.