TY - JOUR A1 - Kiel, Mareike A1 - Möhwald, Helmuth A1 - Bargheer, Matias T1 - Broadband measurements of the transient optical complex dielectric function of a nanoparticle/polymer composite upon ultrafast excitation JF - Physical review : B, Condensed matter and materials physics N2 - We determined experimentally the complex transient optical dielectric function of a well-characterized polyelectrolyte/gold-nanoparticle composite system over a broad spectral range upon short pulse laser excitation by simultaneously measuring the time-dependent reflectance and transmittance of white light pulses with femtosecond pump-probe spectroscopy. We extracted directly the ultrafast changes in the real and imaginary parts of the effective dielectric function, epsilon(eff)(r) (omega,t)and epsilon(eff)(i) (omega,t), from the experiment. This complete experimental set of information on the time-dependent complex dielectric function challenges theories modeling the transient dielectric function of gold particles and the effective medium. Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.84.165121 SN - 1098-0121 VL - 84 IS - 16 PB - American Physical Society CY - College Park ER -