Exploring liquid-liquid interfaces with transient evanescent grating techniques

A transient grating setup with evanescent wave probing has been developed to investigate ultrafast processes at liquid-liquid interfaces. In order to evaluate the selectivity of this method to the interface, the speed of sound in the low refractive index medium has been measured as a function of the penetration depth of the probe pulse. Our preliminary results indicate an increase of the speed of sound in methanol with decreasing the probe depth from 100 to 70 nm. However, no correlation was found in acetonitrile in the same range. Modifications of the experiment for improving the selectivity to the interface are proposed. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.