Chapter 7 Electronic and structural response of materials to fast, intense laser pulses

This chapter focuses on several theoretical and experimental studies of the response of matter to light with an emphasis on semiconductors and fast-intense laser pulses. This method is called tight-binding electronion dynamics (TED), because it permits simulations of the coupled dynamics of valence electrons and ion cores in a molecule or material and it employs a tight-binding representation for the electronic states. It is applicable to general non-adiabatic processes including interactions with an intense radiation field. TED is a technique for simulating the coupled dynamics of valence electrons and ion cores in a molecule or material. One of the great strengths of TED is that the structural response is treated at the same time as the electronic response. TED is a promising approach for biological molecules and complex materials because it is inherently an O(N) method. The chapter presents the results for various interesting phenomena involving the response of H₂ ⁺ to fast-intense laser pulses for the absorption and dichroism of chlorophyll and for a conformational change in butadiene.