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A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 11: Interaction with VUV and X-ray light I

A 11.8: Vortrag

Montag, 12. März 2012, 18:45–19:00, V47.03

Imaging electronic quantum motion with light — •Gopal Dixit¹, Oriol Vendrell¹, and Robin Santra^1,2 — ¹Center for Free-Electron Laser Science, DESY, Notkestrasse 85, D-22607 Hamburg, Germany — ²Department of Physics, University of Hamburg, D-20355 Hamburg, Germany

Imaging the quantum motion of electrons not only in real time, but also in real space is essential to understand for example bond breaking and formation in molecules, and charge migration in peptides and biological systems. Time-resolved imaging (TRI) interrogates the unfolding electronic motion in such systems. We show that scattering patterns, obtained by X-ray TRI from an electronic wavepacket, encode spatial and temporal correlations that deviate from the common notion of the instantaneous electronic density as the key quantity being probed. X-ray TRI can be realized with the advent of novel light sources such as X-ray free electron lasers. Surprisingly, the patterns provide an unusually visual manifestation of the quantum nature of light. This quantum nature becomes central only for non-stationary electronic states. The illustrative example used here as a proof of principle lies in the time and energy range of interest corresponding to the dynamics of valence electrons in more complex molecular and biological systems.