Engineering reverse saturable absorbers for desired wavelengths

A variety of applications exist for reverse saturable absorbers (RSAs) in laser science (RSAs are substances whose excited-state absorption cross section is larger than their ground-state absorption cross section at a given wavelength and possess a number of other properties). We propose an approach to designing RSAs at a desired wavelength by construction of dimers of dye molecules which absorb near the wavelength of interest. The dimer ground-state absorption is to a state in which the excitation is spread over both monomeric units and the excited-state absorption commences from this state to the doubly excited electronic state in which both monomeric units are excited.