The Polarization Projected Density Matrix: A Practical Way to Recover Molecular Frame Information from Isotropic Samples

Abstract

We present a novel approach to model ultrafast time-dependent nonlinear optical polarization sensitive signals emitted from randomly-oriented molecules. By projecting the laboratory-frame analyzer polarization axis into the molecular frame and linking that axis with the density matrix through a tensor product, we demonstrate an approach to find a specific molecular orientation that yields a good approximation to simulated four-wave mixing signals produced by the same model but with averaging over molecular orientation.