Potential for ultrafast dynamic chemical imaging with few-cycle infrared lasers

TL;DR

This paper explores using few-cycle infrared lasers to generate high-energy photoelectrons, enabling potential ultrafast chemical imaging by reconstructing molecular structures with high temporal and spatial resolution.

Contribution

It demonstrates that angular distributions of back rescattered photoelectrons can be used to extract elastic scattering cross sections, facilitating molecular imaging.

Findings

Extraction of differential elastic scattering cross sections from photoelectron spectra.

Manipulation of laser parameters to control free electron energy and direction.

Potential application in ultrafast imaging of chemical and biological processes.

Abstract

We studied the photoelectron spectra generated by an intense few-cycle infrared laser pulse. By focusing on the angular distributions of the back rescattered high energy photoelectrons, we show that accurate differential elastic scattering cross sections of the target ion by free electrons can be extracted. Since the incident direction and the energy of the free electrons can be easily changed by manipulating the laser's polarization, intensity, and wavelength, these extracted elastic scattering cross sections, in combination with more advanced inversion algorithms, may be used to reconstruct the effective single-scattering potential of the molecule, thus opening up the possibility of using few-cycle infrared lasers as powerful table-top tools for imaging chemical and biological transformations, with the desired unprecedented temporal and spatial resolutions.