Mainz 2017 – scientific programme

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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik

MO 19: Clusters II (with A)

MO 19.7: Talk

Friday, March 10, 2017, 12:45–13:00, N 3

Signatures of Rabi cycling and excited state population in single-shot coherent diffractive imaging — •Björn Thorben Kruse, Christian Peltz, and Thomas Fennel — Institute of Physics, University of Rostock, Germany

Single-shot coherent diffractive imaging (CDI) of individual free nanoparticles enables the study of their three-dimensional shape and orientation [1] as well as their optical and electronic properties [2]. Recently, even signatures of quantum-mechanical vortices have been observed in scattering images of superfluid helium droplets [3], demonstrating that CDI provides access to the observation of rotational excitation in quantum liquids. Whereas the imaging of these vortices is an indirect detection of quantum effects, it remains an open question to what extent quantum effects can be observed directly and how their signatures would look like. Here we study the possibility to directly image the nonlinear quantum-mechanical few-level dynamics in laser-excited nanoparticles. For our theoretical analysis, we employ a Maxwell-Bloch type description of the scattering problem, where the polarization dynamics is described in local few-level approximation and field propagation is treated with the finite-difference time-domain method (FDTD). The origin of non-linear effects in resonant XUV scattering from droplets and possible routes to the spatiotemporal imaging of population dynamics will be discussed.

[1] I. Barke et al., Nat. Comm. 6, 6187 (2015)

[2] C. Bostedt et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 093401 (2012)

[3] L. F. Gomez et al., Science 345, 6199:906-909 (2014)