Harmonic theory of thermal two-photon absorption in benzene

A correlation function formalism is applied to compute the two-photon absorption spectrum of benzene. Using harmonic Hamiltonians for the ground and excited electronic states, we find that the theory agrees qualitatively with the experimentally observed sparsity of the thermal two-photon absorption spectrum as compared with the single-photon absorption spectrum. An expression for the average vibrational energy in the excited state is derived. We find that cooling of the nascent vibrational energy in the electronically excited state is not as extensive in the two-photon absorption process as compared to the single-photon case.