• Advanced Photonics
  • Vol. 5, Issue 5, 056001 (2023)
Lixin He1, Yanqing He1, Siqi Sun1, Esteban Goetz2, Anh-Thu Le2, Xiaosong Zhu1, Pengfei Lan1、*, Peixiang Lu1、3、*, and Chii-Dong Lin4
Author Affiliations
  • 1Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics and School of Physics, Wuhan, China
  • 2University of Connecticut, Department of Physics, Storrs, Connecticut, United States
  • 3Wuhan Institute of Technology, Hubei Key Laboratory of Optical Information and Pattern Recognition, Wuhan, China
  • 4Kansas State University, Department of Physics, Manhattan, Kansas, United States
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    DOI: 10.1117/1.AP.5.5.056001 Cite this Article Set citation alerts
    Lixin He, Yanqing He, Siqi Sun, Esteban Goetz, Anh-Thu Le, Xiaosong Zhu, Pengfei Lan, Peixiang Lu, Chii-Dong Lin. Attosecond probing and control of charge migration in carbon-chain molecule[J]. Advanced Photonics, 2023, 5(5): 056001 Copy Citation Text show less

    Abstract

    In quantum mechanics, when an electron is quickly ripped off from a molecule, a superposition of new eigenstates of the cation creates an electron wave packet that governs the charge flow inside, which has been called charge migration (CM). Experimentally, extracting such dynamics at its natural (attosecond) timescale is quite difficult. We report the first such experiment in a linear carbon-chain molecule, butadiyne (C4H2), via high-harmonic spectroscopy (HHS). By employing advanced theoretical and computational tools, we showed that the wave packet and the CM of a single molecule are reconstructed from the harmonic spectra for each fixed-in-space angle of the molecule. For this one-dimensional molecule, we calculate the center of charge ⟨ x ⟩ ( t ) to obtain vcm, to quantify the migration speed and how it depends on the orientation angle. The findings also uncover how the electron dynamics at the first few tens to hundreds of attoseconds depends on molecular structure. The method can be extended to other molecules where the HHS technique can be employed.
    Supplementary Materials
    Lixin He, Yanqing He, Siqi Sun, Esteban Goetz, Anh-Thu Le, Xiaosong Zhu, Pengfei Lan, Peixiang Lu, Chii-Dong Lin. Attosecond probing and control of charge migration in carbon-chain molecule[J]. Advanced Photonics, 2023, 5(5): 056001
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