Abstract
We have conducted femtosecond transient absorption experiments on the excited-state dynamics of trans- and cis-hexatriene (HT) in solution. The transient absorption in the visible region decays with the time constant of about 500 fs, indicating that the internal conversion (IC) to the ground state occurs quite efficiently. The bleach recovery signal contains several time constants. The vibrational relaxation in the ground state occurs in 10–20ps and the slow relaxation process, which may be due to the conformational change around C—C single bond, proceeds in a subnanosecond time scale.