The goal of this work is to understand certain aspects of how light interacts with the condensed phase. The emphasis is on understanding fundamental processes and making the fundamental inventions that are expected to feed into areas of technological interest. This research is aimed at using Raman Spectroscopic methods to learn more detail about intermolecular interactions and dynamical processes in solids. Picosecond laser experiments also will be carried out to help determine mechanisms of energy disposal in organic solids using a new method of impurity pumping. This approach, combined with experiments that use direct pumping of vibrational overtone states with infrared radiation, is expected to yield new information about energy relaxation pathways in the ground states of organic materials. Proton transfer will be examined by means of time resolved spectroscopy.
