Limits of the Plane Wave Approximation in the Measurement of Molecular Properties

Abstract

Rescattering electrons offer great potential as probes of molecular properties on ultrafast timescales. The most famous example is molecular tomography, in which high harmonic spectra of oriented molecules are mapped to ``tomographic images'' of the relevant molecular orbitals. The accuracy of such reconstructions may be greatly affected by the distortion of scattering wavefunctions from their asymptotic forms due to interactions with the parent ion. We investigate the validity of the commonly used plane wave approximation in molecular tomography, showing how such distortions affect the resulting orbital reconstructions.

References in corpus (2)

• High Harmonic Generation in SF${}_6$: Raman-excited Vibrational Quantum Beats
• FERM3D: A finite element R-matrix electron molecule scattering code

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Self-probing of Molecules with High Harmonic Generation
• Theoretical description of circular dichroism in photoelectron angular distributions of randomly oriented chiral molecules after multi-photon photoionization
• Diffractive molecular orbital tomography
• High-order harmonic spectroscopy for molecular imaging of polyatomic molecules
• Molecular orbital tomography beyond the plane wave approximation
• Vibrational interference of Raman and high-harmonic generation pathways