Exciton Dephasing and Thermal Line Broadening in Molecular Aggregates

Using a model of Frenkel excitons coupled to a bath of acoustic phonons in the host medium, we study the temperature dependence of the dephasing rates and homogeneous line width in linear molecular aggregates. The model includes localization by disorder and predicts a power-law thermal scaling of the effective homogeneous line width. The theory gives excellent agreement with temperature dependent absorption and hole-burning experiments on aggregates of the dye pseudoisocyanine.