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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik
MO 6: Molecular Spectroscopy of Liquid Jets II
MO 6.3: Talk
Tuesday, March 11, 2025, 11:30–11:45, HS XV
Impact of solvation on the ultrafast ring-opening dynamics of furfural — •Joel Trester1,2, Pengju Zhang1,3, Robin Santra2,4,5, Ludger Inhester2,5, and Hans Jakob Wörner1 — 1Laboratory of Physical Chemistry, ETH Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland — 2Center for Free-Electron Laser Science CFEL, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY, Hamburg, Germany — 3Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China — 4Department of Physics, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany — 5Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
We investigated the photoinduced ring-opening dynamics of furfural in both the gas phase and pure liquid phase using a table-top monochromatized high-harmonic source combined with heatable in-vacuum sample delivery and liquid micro-jet technology. By leveraging a UV-pump XUV-probe scheme we have performed time-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy (TRPES) to access all outer-valence molecular orbitals. By achieving excellent agreement with hybrid QM/MM surface-hopping molecular dynamics simulations, this study provides the first comprehensive comparison of such dynamics between the gas and liquid phases under identical experimental conditions. Notably, we reveal that the underlying mechanism of ring opening changes significantly from the gas to the liquid phase, both in timescale and pathways. This work opens new perspectives in the field of ultrafast photochemical dynamics, by enabling a detailed exploration of solvent effects on nuclear dynamics triggered by electronic relaxation on ultrafast timescales.
Keywords: Photoelectron spectroscopy; Ultrafast science; Photochemisty