We have investigated the appearance of coherence in pseudo two-colour
pump-probe spectroscopy, and have numerically analyzed the usefulness
of this method for extracting information on electronic coherence dyna
mics. A number of distinct characteristics are found that would allow
a determination of dephasing times from the data, both when the dephas
ing dynamics occurs on a longer and shorter time-scale than set by the
time-resolution resulting from the used laser pulses. A severe limita
tion is, however, that all these characteristic traits vanish once inh
omogeneity governs the absorption line shape. Nevertheless, the method
seems very suitable for unravelling spectra and dynamics in case of s
everal overlapping homogeneous bands.