English

X-ray diffraction from isolated and strongly aligned gas-phase molecules with a free-electron laser

Atomic Physics 2014-03-11 v2

Abstract

We report experimental results on x-ray diffraction of quantum-state-selected and strongly aligned ensembles of the prototypical asymmetric rotor molecule 2,5-diiodobenzonitrile using the Linac Coherent Light Source. The experiments demonstrate first steps toward a new approach to diffractive imaging of distinct structures of individual, isolated gas-phase molecules. We confirm several key ingredients of single molecule diffraction experiments: the abilities to detect and count individual scattered x-ray photons in single shot diffraction data, to deliver state-selected, e. g., structural-isomer-selected, ensembles of molecules to the x-ray interaction volume, and to strongly align the scattering molecules. Our approach, using ultrashort x-ray pulses, is suitable to study ultrafast dynamics of isolated molecules.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1307.4577,
  title  = {X-ray diffraction from isolated and strongly aligned gas-phase molecules with a free-electron laser},
  author = {Jochen Küpper and Stephan Stern and Lotte Holmegaard and Frank Filsinger and Arnaud Rouzée and Artem Rudenko and Per Johnsson and Andrew V. Martin and Marcus Adolph and Andrew Aquila and Saša Bajt and Anton Barty and Christoph Bostedt and John Bozek and Carl Caleman and Ryan Coffee and Nicola Coppola and Tjark Delmas and Sascha Epp and Benjamin Erk and Lutz Foucar and Tais Gorkhover and Lars Gumprecht and Andreas Hartmann and Robert Hartmann and Günter Hauser and Peter Holl and Andre Hömke and Nils Kimmel and Faton Krasniqi and Kai-Uwe Kühnel and Jochen Maurer and Marc Messerschmidt and Robert Mosshammer and Christian Reich and Benedikt Rudek and Robin Santra and Ilme Schlichting and Carlo Schmidt and Sebastian Schorb and Joachim Schulz and Heike Soltau and John C. H. Spence and Dmitri Starodub and Lothar Strüder and Jan Thøgersen and Marc J. J. Vrakking and Georg Weidenspointner and Thomas A. White and Cornelia Wunderer and Gerard Meijer and Joachim Ullrich and Henrik Stapelfeldt and Daniel Rolles and Henry N. Chapman},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1307.4577},
  year   = {2014}
}

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