Related papers: Imaging atom-clusters by hard x-ray free electron …
Structural studies of biological macromolecules are severely limited by radiation damage. Traditional crystallography curbs the effects of damage by spreading damage over many copies of the molecule of interest. X-ray lasers, such as the…
Filming atomic motion within molecules is an active pursuit of molecular physics and quantum chemistry. A promising method is laser-induced Coulomb Explosion Imaging (CEI) where a laser pulse rapidly ionizes many electrons from a molecule,…
At low energies, nuclear fusion is strongly affected by electron screening of the Coulomb repulsion among the fusing nuclei. It may thus be possible to catalyze nuclear fusion in molecules (i.e., to fuse specific nuclei in situ) through…
Short-wavelength free-electron lasers with their ultrashort pulses at high intensities have originated new approaches for tracking molecular dynamics from the vista of specific sites. X-ray pump X-ray probe schemes even allow to address…
Accelerator-based X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) are the latest addition to the revolutionary tools of discovery for the 21st century. The two major components of an XFEL are an accelerator-produced electron beam and a magnetic…
In single particle coherent x-ray diffraction imaging experiments, performed at x-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs), samples are exposed to intense x-ray pulses to obtain single-shot diffraction patterns. The high intensity induces…
We present some approaches to the computation of ultra-fast laser pulses capable of selectively breaking molecular bonds. The calculations are based on a mixed quantum-classical description: The electrons are treated quantum mechanically…
Exposing a molecule to intense light pulses may bring this molecule to a nonstationary quantum state, thus launching correlated dynamics of electronic and nuclear subsystems. Although much had been achieved in the understanding of…
A comprehensive theoretical approach to describe the electron-ion radiative recombination in the presence of intense, short laser pulses, which accounts for nondipole corrections is presented. It is based on the relativistic Coulomb-Volkov…
Knowing the characteristic relaxation time of free electrons in a dense plasma is crucial to our understanding of plasma equilibration and transport. However, experimental investigations of electron relaxation dynamics have been hindered by…
Intense, ultrashort pulses of 800 nm laser light (12 fs, $\sim$4 optical cycles) of peak intensity 5$\times$10$^{14}$ W cm$^{-2}$ have been used to irradiate gas-phase Xe$_n$ clusters ($n$=500-25,000) so as to induce multiple ionization and…
Semi-classical molecular dynamics simulations of small rare gas clusters in short laser pulses of 100 nm wavelength were performed. For comparison, the cluster response to 800 nm laser pulses was investigated as well. The inner ionization…
We propose and analyze a novel regenerative amplifier free electron laser (FEL) to produce fully coherent x-ray pulses. The method makes use of narrow-bandwidth Bragg crystals to form an x-ray feedback loop around a relatively short…
Sub-angstrom spatial resolution of electron density coupled with sub-femtosecond temporal resolution is required to directly observe the dynamics of the electronic structure of a molecule after photoinitiation or some other ultrafast…
The strong influence of the electron dynamics provides the possibility of controlling the expansion of laser-produced plasmas by appropriately shaping the laser pulse. A simple irradiation scheme is proposed to tailor the explosion of large…
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…
A barrier to realizing the potential of molecules for quantum information science applications is a lack of high-fidelity, single-molecule imaging techniques. Here, we present and theoretically analyze a general scheme for dispersive…
It was recently discovered that molecular ionization at high x-ray intensity is enhanced, in comparison with that of isolated atoms, through a phenomenon called CREXIM (charge-rearrangement-enhanced x-ray ionization of molecules). X-ray…
When passing through an undulator in a Free Electron Laser, dense bunches of relativistic electrons split into micro-bunches, attaining a periodic space-time structure. We show that the field of such periodically modulated bunches is…
Ionization of atoms and molecules in laser fields can lead to various interesting interference structures in the photoelectron spectrum. For the case of a super-intense extreme ultraviolet laser pulse, we identify a novel petal-like…