Quantum state tomography of molecules by ultrafast diffraction
Abstract
Ultrafast electron diffraction and time-resolved serial crystallography are the basis of the ongoing revolution in capturing at the atomic level of detail the structural dynamics of molecules. However, most experiments employ the classical "ball-and-stick" depictions, and the information of molecular quantum states, such as the density matrix, is missing. Here, we introduce a framework for the preparation and ultrafast coherent diffraction from rotational wave packets of molecules, and we establish a new variant of quantum state tomography for ultrafast electron diffraction to characterize the molecular quantum states. The ability to reconstruct the density matrix of molecules of arbitrary degrees of freedom will provide us with an unprecedentedly clear view of the quantum states of molecules, and enable the visualization of effects dictated by the quantum dynamics of molecules.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2107.13310,
title = {Quantum state tomography of molecules by ultrafast diffraction},
author = {Ming Zhang and Shuqiao Zhang and Yanwei Xiong and Hankai Zhang and Anatoly A. Ischenko and Oriol Vendrell and Xiaolong Dong and Xiangxu Mu and Martin Centurion and Haitan Xu and R. J. Dwayne Miller and Zheng Li},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.13310},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2012.11899