Evidence of Ultrafast Charge Transfer Driven by Coherent Lattice Vibrations.

We report evidence that intermolecular vibrations coherently drive charge transfer between the sites of a material on ultrafast time scales. Following a nonresonant stimulated Raman pump pulse that excites the organic material quinhydrone, we observe the initial appearance of oscillations due to intermolecular lattice vibrations and then the delayed appearance of a higher-frequency oscillation that we assign to a totally symmetric intramolecular vibration. We use the coherent dynamics of the transient reflectivity signal to propose that coherence transfer drives excitation of this intramolecular vibration. Furthermore, we conclude that the dynamical frequency shift of the intramolecular vibration reports the formation of a quasi-stable charge-separated state on ultrafast time scales. We calculate model dynamics using the extended Hubbard Hamiltonian to explain coherence transfer due to vibrationally driven charge transfer. These results demonstrate that the coherent excitation of low-frequency vibrations can drive charge transfer in the solid state and control material properties.