What Do We Learn from Two-Dimensional Raman Spectra by Varying the Polarization Conditions?

The signals obtained from the $5^{th}$-order (two-dimensional) Raman spectrum of a liquid can depend dramatically on the polarizations of the various light beams, but to date there has been no evidence presented that different polarization conditions probe any fundamentally different aspects of liquid dynamics. In order to explore the molecular significance of polarization we have carried out a molecular dynamics simulation of the $5^{th}$-order spectrum of a dilute solution of CS₂ in liquid Xe, perhaps the simplest system capable of displaying a full range of polarization dependencies. By focusing on the 5 distinct rotational invariants revealed by the different polarizations and by comparing our results with those from liquid Xe, a liquid whose spectrum has no significant polarization dependence, we discovered that the polarization experiments do, in fact, yield valuable microscopic information. With different linear combinations of the experimental response functions one can separate the part of the signal derived from the purely interaction-induced part of the many-body polarizability from the portion with the largest contributions from single-molecule polarizabilities. This division does not directly address the underlying liquid dynamics, but it significantly simplifies the interpretation of the theoretical calculations which do address this issue. We find that the different linear combinations differ as well in whether they exhibit nodal lines. Despite the absence of nodes with the atomic liquid Xe, observing the resilience of our solution's nodes when we artificially remove the anisotropy of our solute leads us to conclude that there is no direct connection between nodes and specifically molecular degrees of freedom.