Erlangen 2022 – scientific programme

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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik

MO 2: X-ray FELs (joint session MO/A)

MO 2.7: Talk

Monday, March 14, 2022, 15:30–15:45, MO-H5

Tracing Inner-Shell-Ionization-Induced Dynamics of Water Molecules Using an X-ray Free-Electron Laser and Ab-Initio Simulations — •Ludger Inhester¹, Till Jahnke², Renaud Guillemin³, and Maria Novella Piancastelli^3,4 — ¹Center for Free-Electron Laser Science CFEL, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Hamburg — ²European XFEL, Schenefeld — ³Sorbonne Université, CNRS, LCPMR, Paris — ⁴Uppsala University, Uppsala

The response of molecules to ionizing radiation is of utmost relevance to many research areas. Multi-coincidence signals from experiments at x-ray free-electrons lasers provide us new opportunities to study the dynamics of molecules upon inner-shell ionization. In a recent experiment at the European XFEL, water vapor has been exposed to intense x-ray pulses and all the resulting ion fragments have been recorded in coincidence. In this talk, I will discuss how through ab-initio simulations of the multiphoton multiple ionization and fragmentation dynamics we could identify distinct signatures in the ion momentum data with different break-up patterns. By combining experimental results and theoretical modeling, we were able to image the dissociation dynamics of water after core-shell ionization and subsequent Auger decay in unprecedented detail and uncover fundamental dynamical patterns relevant for the radiation damage in aqueous environments. [1]

[1] T. Jahnke et al., Phys. Rev. X 11, 041044 (2021)