Self-referenced coherent diffraction x-ray movie of Angstrom- and femtosecond-scale atomic motion

Abstract

Time-resolved femtosecond x-ray diffraction patterns from laser-excited molecular iodine are used to create a movie of intramolecular motion with time and space resolution of $30$fs and $0.3$ Å. The high spatial fidelity is due to interference between the moving excitation and the static initial charge distribution. This x-ray interference has not been employed to image internal motion in molecules before. The initial state is used as the local oscillator for heterodyne amplification of the excited charge distribution to retrieve real-space movies of atomic motion on Ångstrom and femtosecond scales. Coherent vibrational motion and dispersion, dissociation, and rotational dephasing are all clearly visible in the data, thereby demonstrating the stunning sensitivity of heterodyne methods.

arXiv commentAccepted by Physical Review Letters

References in corpus (4)

• X-ray diffraction from isolated and strongly aligned gas-phase molecules with a free-electron laser
• Imaging electronic quantum motion with light
• Diffractive Imaging of Coherent Nuclear Motion in Isolated Molecules
• Diffractive imaging of a molecular rotational wavepacket with femtosecond Megaelectronvolt electron pulses

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