No Arabic abstract
The recent demonstration of isolated attosecond pulses from an X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) opens the possibility for probing ultrafast electron dynamics at X-ray wavelengths. An established experimental method for probing ultrafast dynamics is X-ray transient absorption spectroscopy, where the X-ray absorption spectrum is measured by scanning the central photon energy and recording the resultant photoproducts. The spectral bandwidth inherent to attosecond pulses is wide compared to the resonant features typically probed, which generally precludes the application of this technique in the attosecond regime. In this paper we propose and demonstrate a new technique to conduct transient absorption spectroscopy with broad bandwidth attosecond pulses with the aid of ghost imaging, recovering sub-bandwidth resolution in photoproduct-based absorption measurements.
We investigate theoretically charge migration following prompt double ionization of a polyatomic molecule (C$_2$H$_4$BrI) and find that for double ionization, correlation-driven charge migration appears to be particularly prominent, i.e., we observe exceptionally rich dynamics solely driven by the electron-electron interaction even in the situation when the electrons are emitted from outer-valence orbitals. These strongly correlated electron dynamics are witnessed in the theoretically determined time-resolved transient absorption cross section. Strikingly, features in the cross section can be traced back to electron hole populations and time-dependent partial charges and hence, can be interpreted with surprising ease. Remarkably, by taking advantage of element specific core-to-valence transitions, the hole population dynamics can be followed both in time and space. With this, not only do we report the high relevance of correlation-driven charge migration following double ionization but our findings also highlight the outstanding role of attosecond transient absorption spectroscopy (ATAS) as one of the most promising techniques for monitoring ultrafast electron dynamics in complex molecular systems.
Transient absorption is a very powerful observable in attosecond experiments on atoms, molecules and solids and is frequently used in experiments employing phase-locked few-cycle infrared and XUV laser pulses derived from high harmonic generation. We show numerically and analytically that in non-centrosymmetric systems, such as many polyatomic molecules, which-way interference enabled by the lack of parity conservation leads to new spectral absorption features, which directly reveal the laser electric field. The extension of Attosecond Transient Absorption Spectroscopy (ATAS) to such targets hence becomes sensitive to global and local inversion symmetry. We anticipate that ATAS will find new applications in non-centrosymmetric systems, in which the carrier-to-envelope phase of the infrared pulse becomes a relevant parameter and in which the orientation of the sample and the electronic symmetry of the molecule can be addressed.
We investigate ultrafast dynamics of the lowest singlet excited electronic state in liquid nitrobenzene using Ultrafast Transient Polarization Spectroscopy (UTPS), extending the well-known technique of Optical-Kerr Effect (OKE) spectroscopy to excited electronic states. The third-order non-linear response of the excited molecular ensemble is highly sensitive to details of excited state character and geometries and is measured using two femtosecond pulses following a third femtosecond pulse that populates the S1 excited state. By measuring this response as a function of time delays between the three pulses involved, we extract the dephasing time of the wave-packet on the excited state. The dephasing time measured as a function of time-delay after pump excitation shows oscillations indicating oscillatory wave-packet dynamics on the excited state. From the experimental measurements and supporting theoretical calculations, we deduce that the wave-packet completely leaves the S1 state surface after three traversals of the inter-system crossing between the singlet S1 and triplet T2 states.
We investigate the evolution of extreme ultraviolet (XUV) spectral lineshapes in an optically-thick helium gas under near-infrared (IR) perturbation. In our experimental and theoretical work, we systematically vary the IR intensity, time-delay, gas density and IR polarization parameters to study lineshape modifications induced by collective interactions, in a regime beyond the single atom response of a thin, dilute gas. In both experiment and theory, we find that specific features in the frequency-domain absorption profile, and their evolution with propagation distance, can be attributed to the interplay between resonant attosecond pulse propagation and IR induced phase shifts. Our calculations show that this interplay also manifests itself in the time domain, with the IR pulse influencing the reshaping of the XUV pulse propagating in the resonant medium.
We simulate the transient absorption of attosecond pulses of infrared-laser-dressed atoms by considering a three-level system with the adiabatic approximation. The delay-dependent interference features are investigated from the perspective of the coherent interaction processes between the attosecond pulse and the quasi-harmonics. We find that many features of the interference fringes in the absorption spectra of the attosecond pulse can be attributed to the coherence phase difference. However, the modulation signals of laser-induced sidebands of the dark state is found related to the population dynamics of the dark state by the dressing field.