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- McFarland, B. K., et al.
(författare)
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Ultrafast X-ray Auger probing of photoexcited molecular dynamics
- 2014
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Ingår i: Nature Communications. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2041-1723. ; 5, s. 4235-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Molecules can efficiently and selectively convert light energy into other degrees of freedom. Disentangling the underlying ultrafast motion of electrons and nuclei of the photoexcited molecule presents a challenge to current spectroscopic approaches. Here we explore the photoexcited dynamics of molecules by an interaction with an ultrafast X-ray pulse creating a highly localized core hole that decays via Auger emission. We discover that the Auger spectrum as a function of photoexcitation-X-ray-probe delay contains valuable information about the nuclear and electronic degrees of freedom from an element-specific point of view. For the nucleobase thymine, the oxygen Auger spectrum shifts towards high kinetic energies, resulting from a particular C-O bond stretch in the pi pi* photoexcited state. A subsequent shift of the Auger spectrum towards lower kinetic energies displays the electronic relaxation of the initial photoexcited state within 200 fs. Ab-initio simulations reinforce our interpretation and indicate an electronic decay to the n pi* state.
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