Related papers: Long-lasting field-free alignment of large molecul…
We show that a 450 fs nonresonant, moderately intense, linearly polarized laser pulse can induce field-free molecular axis alignment of methyliodide molecules dissolved in a helium nanodroplet. Time-resolved measurements reveal rotational…
We introduce a new optical tool - a "two-dimensional optical centrifuge", capable of aligning molecules in extreme rotational states. Unlike the conventional centrifuge, which confines the molecules in the plane of their rotation, its…
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…
Fixing molecules in space is a crucial step for the imaging of molecular structure and dynamics. Here, we demonstrate three-dimensional (3D) field-free alignment of the prototypical asymmetric top molecule indole using elliptically…
We experimentally demonstrate that the rotation of molecules embedded in helium nanodroplets can be controlled with an optical centrifuge, allowing for the study of molecular dynamics inside the strongly interacting many-body environment of…
Iodine (I$_2$) molecules embedded in He nanodroplets are aligned by a 160 ps long laser pulse. The highest degree of alignment, occurring at the peak of the pulse and quantified by $\langle \cos^2 \theta_{2D} \rangle$, is measured as a…
We report experiments on field-free molecular alignment performed at FLASH, the free electron laser (FEL) in Hamburg. The impulsive alignment induced by a 100 fs near-infrared laser pulse in a rotationally cold CO_2 sample is characterized…
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 use an optical centrifuge to align asymmetric top $\mathrm{SO_2}$ molecules by adiabatically spinning their most polarizable O-O axis. The effective centrifugal potential in the rotating frame confines sulfur atoms to the plane of the…
We demonstrate that a sodium dimer, Na$_{2}$($1^3\Sigma_{u}^+$), residing on the surface of a helium nanodroplet, can be set into rotation by a nonresonant 1.0 ps infrared laser pulse. The time-dependent degree of alignment measured,…
Rotation of molecules embedded in He nanodroplets is explored by a combination of fs laser-induced alignment experiments and angulon quasiparticle theory. We demonstrate that at low fluence of the fs alignment pulse, the molecule and its…
Laser-induced alignment of particles and molecules was long envisioned to support three-dimensional structure determination using "single-molecule diffraction" with x-ray free-electron lasers [PRL 92, 198102 (2004)]. However, the alignment…
We report the first experimental observation of non-adiabatic field-free orientation of a heteronuclear diatomic molecule (CO) induced by an intense two-color (800 and 400 nm) femtosecond laser field. We monitor orientation by measuring…
We combine experimental and theoretical approaches to explore excited rotational states of molecules embedded in helium nanodroplets using CS$_2$ and I$_2$ as examples. Laser-induced nonadiabatic molecular alignment is employed to measure…
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…
The interaction of strong laser fields with matter intrinsically provides powerful tools to image transient dynamics with an extremely high spatiotemporal resolution. Here, we study strong-field ionisation of laser-aligned molecules and…
We present a simple quantum mechanical model describing excited rotational states of molecules in superfluid helium nanodroplets, as recently studied in non-adiabatic molecular alignment experiments [Cherepanov et al., Phys. Rev. A 104,…
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…
Controlling the interactions between atoms with external fields opened up new branches in physics ranging from strongly correlated atomic systems to ideal Bose and Fermi gases and Efimov physics. Such control usually prepares samples that…
Present photoionization experiments cannot measure molecular frame photoelectron angular distributions (MFPAD) from the outermost valence electrons of molecules. We show that details of the MFPAD can be retrieved with high-order harmonics…