Differentiating Three-Dimensional Molecular Structures using Laser-induced Coulomb Explosion Imaging
Abstract
Coulomb explosion imaging (CEI) with x-ray free electron lasers has recently been shown to be a powerful method for obtaining detailed structural information of gas-phase planar ring molecules [R. Boll et al. Nat. Phys. 18, 423-428 (2022)]. In this Letter, we investigate the potential of CEI driven by a tabletop laser and extend this approach to differentiating three-dimensional (3D) structures. We study the static CEI patterns of planar and nonplanar organic molecules that resemble the structures of typical products formed in ring-opening reactions. Our results reveal that each molecule exhibits a well-localized and distinctive pattern in 3D fragment-ion momentum space. We find that these patterns yield direct information about the molecular structures and can be qualitatively reproduced using a classical Coulomb explosion simulation. Our findings suggest that laser-induced CEI can serve as a robust method for differentiating molecular structures of organic ring and chain molecules. As such, it holds great promise as a method for following ultrafast structural changes, e.g., during ring-opening reactions, by tracking the motion of individual atoms in pump-probe experiments.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2408.08389,
title = {Differentiating Three-Dimensional Molecular Structures using Laser-induced Coulomb Explosion Imaging},
author = {Huynh Van Sa Lam and Anbu Selvam Venkatachalam and Surjendu Bhattacharyya and Keyu Chen and Kurtis Borne and Enliang Wang and Rebecca Boll and Till Jahnke and Vinod Kumarappan and Artem Rudenko and Daniel Rolles},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.08389},
year = {2024}
}