Abstract

We have measured the angular distributions of high energy photoelectrons of benzene molecules generated by intense infrared femtosecond laser pulses. These electrons arise from the elastic collisions between the benzene ions with the previously tunnel-ionized electrons that have been driven back by the laser field. Theory shows that laser-free elastic differential cross sections (DCSs) can be extracted from these photoelectrons, and the DCS can be used to retrieve the bond lengths of gas-phase molecules similar to the conventional electron diffraction method. From our experimental results, we have obtained the C-C and C-H bond lengths of benzene with a spatial resolution of about 10 pm. Our results demonstrate that laser induced electron diffraction (LIED) experiments can be carried out with the present-day ultrafast intense lasers already. Looking ahead, with aligned or oriented molecules, more complete spatial information of the molecule can be obtained from LIED, and applying LIED to probe photo-excited molecules, a "molecular movie" of the dynamic system may be created with sub-Ångström spatial and few-ten femtosecond temporal resolutions.

Department(s)

Physics

Comments

This work was supported in part by grants-in-aid for scientific research from JSPS, by the X-ray Free Electron Laser Utilization Research Project and the X-ray Free Electron Laser Priority Strategy Program of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT) and IMRAM research program. C.C.W. and D.D. received support by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) through Grant No. 2013CB922200 and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11304117, 11534004, and 11127403). A.T.L. and C.D.L. acknowledge the support by the Chemical Sciences, Geosciences and Biosciences Division, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy under Grant No. DE-FG02-86ER13491 and by the National Science Foundation under Award No. IIA-1430493.

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

2329-7778

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Final Version

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2016 American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), All rights reserved.

Creative Commons Licensing

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Publication Date

01 May 2016

PubMed ID

27462650

Included in

Physics Commons

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