Picosecond pulse-shaping for strong three-dimensional field-free alignment of generic asymmetric-top molecules

Terry Mullins, Evangelos T. Karamatskos, Joss Wiese, Jolijn Onvlee, Arnaud Rouzée, Andrey Yachmenev, Sebastian Trippel and Jochen Küpper ()
Additional contact information
Terry Mullins: Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY
Evangelos T. Karamatskos: Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY
Joss Wiese: Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY
Jolijn Onvlee: Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY
Arnaud Rouzée: Max Born Institute
Andrey Yachmenev: Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY
Sebastian Trippel: Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY
Jochen Küpper: Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract Fixing molecules in space is a crucial step for the imaging of molecular structure and dynamics. Here, we demonstrate three-dimensional (3D) field-free alignment of the prototypical asymmetric top molecule indole using elliptically polarized, shaped, off-resonant laser pulses. A truncated laser pulse is produced using a combination of extreme linear chirping and controlled phase and amplitude shaping using a spatial-light-modulator (SLM) based pulse shaper of a broadband laser pulse. The angular confinement is detected through velocity-map imaging of H+ and C2+ fragments resulting from strong-field ionization and Coulomb explosion of the aligned molecules by intense femtosecond laser pulses. The achieved three-dimensional alignment is characterized by comparing the result of ion-velocity-map measurements for different alignment directions and for different times during and after the alignment laser pulse to accurate computational results. The achieved strong three-dimensional field-free alignment of $$ =0.89$$ = 0.89 demonstrates the feasibility of both, strong three-dimensional alignment of generic complex molecules and its quantitative characterization.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28951-z Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-28951-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-28951-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().