English

Observation of molecular dipole excitations by attosecond self-streaking

Optics 2015-12-23 v1 Atomic and Molecular Clusters

Abstract

We propose a protocol to probe the ultrafast evolution and dephasing of coherent electronic excitation in molecules in the time domain by the intrinsic streaking field generated by the molecule itself. Coherent electronic motion in the endohedral fullerene \Necsixty~is initiated by a moderately intense femtosecond UV-VIS pulse leading to coherent oscillations of the molecular dipole moment that persist after the end of the laser pulse. The resulting time-dependent molecular near-field is probed through the momentum modulation of photoemission from the central neon atom by a time-delayed attosecond XUV pulse. Our ab-initio time-dependent density functional theory and classical trajectory simulations predict that this self-streaking signal accurately traces the molecular dipole oscillations in real time. We discuss the underlying processes and give an analytical model that captures the essence of our ab-initio simulations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1505.05857,
  title  = {Observation of molecular dipole excitations by attosecond self-streaking},
  author = {Georg Wachter and Stefan Nagele and Shunsuke A. Sato and Renate Pazourek and Michael Wais and Christoph Lemell and Xiao-Min Tong and Kazuhiro Yabana and Joachim Burgdörfer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1505.05857},
  year   = {2015}
}