Effect of visible pulse shaping on the accuracy of relative intensity measurements in BBSFG vibrational spectroscopy

Quantitative analysis of BroadBand Sum Frequency Generation (BBSFG) vibrational spectra by deconvolution into Lorentzian components has been shown recently to suffer from complications that depend on the spectro-temporal properties and delay of the visible pulse which has to be shaped in order to achieve spectral resolution and possibly temporal discrimination. We present a comprehensive spectro-temporal analysis of BBSFG in order to evaluate quantitatively the consequences of delay dependent spectral changes on the accuracy of BBSFG spectra. We compare purely spectral deconvolution of single spectra and spectro-temporal analysis of multiple spectra obtained with a picosecond visible pulse produced by either a Fabry–Perot (FP) etalon or a 4f pulse shaper (PS). The case of OctaDecaneThiol Self Assembled Monolayer is used for comparison of theory and experiment. Accurate relative intensities can only be obtained from the analysis of multiple spectra generated by the FP-produced visible pulse. Although the spectra obtained with the PS are not delay dependent contrarily to those of the FP, the purely spectral deconvolution does not provide accurate values of the relative intensities. The need for a spectro-temporal analysis is explained by the fact that the first-order IR polarization is distorted both in the time domain by the ps visible pulse shape and in the frequency domain by interferences between the bands that are complicated by a frequency and delay dependent phase shift.