Control of charge migration in molecules by ultrashort laser pulses

Abstract

Due to electronic many-body effects, the ionization of a molecule can trigger ultrafast electron dynamics appearing as a migration of the created hole charge throughout the system. Here we propose a scheme for control of the charge migration dynamics with a single ultrashort laser pulse. We demonstrate by fully ab initio calculations on a molecule containing a chromophore and an amine moieties that simple pulses can be used for stopping the charge-migration oscillations and localizing the charge on the desired site of the system. We argue that this control may be used to predetermine the follow-up nuclear rearrangement and thus the molecular reactivity.

References in corpus (2)

• Radiation Generated by Charge Migration Following Ionization
• Control of populations of two-level systems by a single resonant laser pulse

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Electronic decoherence following photoionization: full quantum-dynamical treatment of the influence of nuclear motion
• Coherent electronic-vibrational dynamics in deuterium bromide probed via attosecond transient absorption spectroscopy
• Coupled nuclear and electron dynamics in the vicinity of a conical intersection
• Theoretical analysis of the role of complex transition dipole phase in XUV transient-absorption probing of charge migration
• Opportunities for Two-color Experiments at the SASE3 undulator line of the European XFEL