Influence of orbital symmetry on diffraction imaging with rescattering electron wave packets

Abstract

The ability to directly follow and time resolve the rearrangement of the nuclei within molecules is a frontier of science that requires atomic spatial and few-femtosecond temporal resolutions. While laser induced electron diffraction can meet these requirements, it was recently concluded that molecules with particular orbital symmetries (such as πg) cannot be imaged using purely backscattering electron wave packets without molecular alignment. Here, we demonstrate, in direct contradiction to these findings, that the orientation and shape of molecular orbitals presents no impediment for retrieving molecular structure with adequate sampling of the momentum transfer space. We overcome previous issues by showcasing retrieval of the structure of randomly oriented O2 and C2H2 molecules, with πg and πu symmetries, respectively, and where their ionisation probabilities do not maximise along their molecular axes. While this removes a serious bottleneck for laser induced diffraction imaging, we find unexpectedly strong back scattering contributions from low-Z atoms.

References in corpus (3)

• Imaging an aligned polyatomic molecule with laser-induced electron diffraction
• Quantitative rescattering theory for laser-induced high-energy plateau photoelectron spectra
• Imaging of Alignment, Deformation and Dissociation of CS2 Molecules using Ultrafast Electron Diffraction

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Symphony on Strong Field Approximation
• It is all about phases: ultrafast holographic photoelectron imaging
• Imaging the Renner-Teller effect using laser-induced electron diffraction
• Above-Threshold Ionization and Laser-Induced Electron Diffraction in Diatomic Molecules
• Setting the photoelectron clock through molecular alignment
• Molecular structure retrieval directly from laboratory-frame photoelectron spectra in laser-induced electron diffraction
• Multiple orbital effects in laser-induced electron diffraction of aligned molecules
• Imaging an isolated water molecule using a single electron wave packet
• The effect of Coulomb field on laser-induced ultrafast imaging methods
• Quantum interference and imaging using intense laser fields
• Laser-induced electron diffraction in the over-the-barrier ionization (OBI) regime
• Robust transverse structures in rescattered photoelectron wavepackets and their observable consequences
• Intermediate-state Coulomb-corrected strong-field approximation for rescattering processes
• Optimal control of photoelectron emission by realistic waveforms