Photothermal techniques have been applied to investigate various physical and chemical phenomena occurring both in homogeneous systems like liquid solutions and in heterogeneous systems like surfaces and interfaces of opaque materials. It is expected that improvement of the temporal resolution in observing photothermal phenomena will provide a new investigative tool for a variety of material systems in condensed phases [A. Harata and T. Sawada, Trends Anal. Chem. 14, 504–515 (1995); A. Harata, T. Edo, and T. Sawada, Chem. Phys. Lett. 249, 112–116 (1996)]. These ultrafast photothermal methods may give one information about nonradiative relaxation, heat conduction, and acoustic propagation on a molecular scale. Recent results on ultrafast photothermal investigations will be presented.