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Updated: Mar 23, 2026

Direct Imaging of Laser-driven Ultrafast Molecular Rotation
Published on: February 4, 2017
Retrieving transient conformational molecular structure information from inner-shell photoionization of laser-aligned
Xu Wang1, Anh-Thu Le1, Chao Yu2
1Department of Physics, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506, USA.
Abstract:
We discuss a scheme to retrieve transient conformational molecular structure information using photoelectron angular distributions (PADs) that have averaged over partial alignments of isolated molecules. The photoelectron is pulled out from a localized inner-shell molecular orbital by an X-ray photon. We show that a transient change in the atomic positions from their equilibrium will lead to a sensitive change in the alignment-averaged PADs, which can be measured and used to retrieve the former. Exploiting the experimental convenience of changing the photon polarization direction, we show that it is advantageous to use PADs obtained from multiple photon polarization directions. A simple single-scattering model is proposed and benchmarked to describe the photoionization process and to do the retrieval using a multiple-parameter fitting method.
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