Attosecond Diffraction Imaging of Electron Dynamics in Solids

TL;DR

This paper extends the theory of time-resolved diffraction imaging to visualize and analyze ultrafast electron dynamics in solids, demonstrated through laser-driven electron behavior in graphene, revealing quantum effects beyond semiclassical predictions.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum theoretical framework for TRDI in solid-state systems, enabling detailed imaging of electron dynamics and transfer phenomena at attosecond timescales.

Findings

TRDI encodes information about time-dependent electron density.

Quantum TRDI predictions differ significantly from semiclassical models.

Application to graphene reveals quantum effects in electron dynamics.

Abstract

Visualizing the electron dynamics in four dimensions of space and time is crucial to the understanding of several ubiquitous processes in nature. Hence, ultrafast X-ray and electron imaging tools have been developed to probe the dynamics of matter by means of the time-resolved diffraction imaging (TRDI). In this work, we report an extension of the theory underlying the TRDI to the case of the laser-driven electron dynamics in solid state systems. We demonstrate that the TRDI signal encodes essential information about the time-dependent electron density of the system under study and thus makes it possible to decipher the ultrafast quantum dynamics and the electron transfer phenomena in solids. We apply the developed approach to image the laser-driven electron dynamics in neutral graphene showing that the predictions made by the fully quantum version of the TRDI deviate significantly from those obtained with the conventional semiclassical approach.