Ultrafast electron diffraction imaging of gas-phase molecules
Abstract
Knowledge of molecular structure is paramount in understanding, and ultimately influencing, chemical reactivity. For nearly a century, diffractive imaging has been used to identify the structures of many biologically-relevant gas-phase molecules with atomic (i.e. Angstrom, A; 1 A = 10 m) spatial resolution. Unravelling the mechanisms of chemical reactions requires the capability to record multiple well-resolved snapshots of the molecular structure as it is evolving on the nuclear (i.e. femtosecond, fs; 1 fs = 10 s) timescale. We present the latest, state-of-the-art ultrafast electron diffraction methods used to retrieve the molecular structure of gas-phase molecules with Angstrom and femtosecond spatio-temporal resolution. We first provide a historical and theoretical background to elastic electron scattering in its application to structural retrieval, followed by details of field-free and field-dressed ultrafast electron diffraction techniques. We discuss the application of these ultrafast methods to time-resolving chemical reactions in real-time, before providing a future outlook of the field and the challenges that exist today and in the future.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2003.02971,
title = {Ultrafast electron diffraction imaging of gas-phase molecules},
author = {Kasra Amini and Jens Biegert},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.02971},
year = {2020}
}