Related papers: Impulsive Laser Induced Alignment of Molecules Dis…
Much of our knowledge about dynamics and functionality of molecular systems has been achieved with femtosecond time-resolved spectroscopy. Despite extensive technical developments over the past decades, some classes of systems have eluded…
We have explored the light induced dynamics in superfluid helium nanodroplets with wide-angle scattering in a pump-probe measurement scheme. The droplets are doped with xenon atoms to facilitate the ignition of a nanoplasma through…
Superfluid helium nanodroplets are often considered as transparent and chemically inert nanometer-sized cryo-matrices for high-resolution or time-resolved spectroscopy of embedded molecules and clusters. On the other hand, when the helium…
Single-shot coherent diffractive imaging (CDI) with intense short-wavelength light pulses enables the structural characterization of individual nanoparticles in free flight with high spatial and temporal resolution. Conventional CDI assumes…
Electric deflection measurements on liquid helium nanodroplets doped with individual polar molecules demonstrate that the cold superfluid matrix enables full orientation of the molecular dipole along the external field. This translates into…
We demonstrate a novel experimental implementation to strongly align molecules at full repetition rates of free-electron lasers. We utilized the available in-house laser system at the coherent x-ray imaging beamline at the Linac Coherent…
We review on the theoretical status of intense laser orientation and alignment. The evolution of the rotational wave packet and its dynamics leading to orientation and alignment is the topic of the present discussion. The major part of the…
Doping a helium nanodroplet with a tiny xenon cluster of a few atoms only, sparks complete ionization of the droplet at laser intensities below the ionization threshold of helium atoms. As a result, the intrinsically inert and transparent…
Inducing and controlling the ultrafast molecular rotational dynamics using shaped laser fields is essential in numerous applications. Several approaches exist that allow following the coherent molecular motion in real-time, including…
Helium nanodroplets doped with polar molecules are studied by electrostatic deflection. This broadly applicable method allows even polyatomic molecules to attain sub-Kelvin temperatures and nearly full orientation in the field. The…
The ionization dynamics of helium droplets in a wide size range from 220 to 10^6 He atoms irradiated with intense femtosecond extreme ultraviolet (XUV) pulses of 10^9 {\div} 10^{12} W/cm2 power density is investigated in detail by…
The relaxation of photoexcited nanosystems is a fundamental process of light-matter interaction. Depending on the couplings of the internal degrees of freedom, relaxation can be ultrafast, converting electronic energy in a few fs, or slow,…
Long-range intermolecular forces are able to steer polar molecules submerged in superfluid helium nanodroplets into highly polar metastable configurations. We demonstrate that the presence of such special structures can be identified, in a…
Coherent diffractive imaging of individual free nanoparticles has opened novel routes for the in-situ analysis of their transient structural, optical, and electronic properties. So far, single-shot single-particle diffraction was assumed to…
We demonstrate the experimental realization of impulsive alignment of carbonyl sulfide (OCS) molecules at the Low Density Matter Beamline (LDM) at the free-electron laser FERMI. OCS molecules in a molecular beam were impulsively aligned…
We investigate experimentally and numerically the field-free orientation of the symmetric top molecule of methyl-iodide at high temperature using a terahertz radiation generated by a plasma induced by a two-color laser beam. The degree of…
A strong inhomogeneous static electric field is used to spatially disperse a rotationally cold supersonic beam of 2,6-difluoroiodobenzene molecules according to their rotational quantum state. The molecules in the lowest lying rotational…
We develop a mathematically simple yet accurate model for the single-pulse non-resonant impulsive alignment of thermal ensembles of linear molecules. We find that our molecular alignment model not only provides a simplification for…
We show that circularly polarized femtosecond laser pulses produce field-free alignment in linear and planar molecules. We study the rotational wavepacket evolution of O$_2$ and benzene created by circularly polarized light. For benzene, we…
Alignment and orientation of molecules by intense, ultrashort laser fields are crucial for a variety of applications in physics and chemistry. These include control of high harmonics generation, molecular orbitals tomography, control of…