Expert opinion : New routes towards even shorter attosecond soft X-ray pulses
20.12.2013
Abstract
In femtochemistry, the generation of controlled ultrashort light pulses from femtosecond lasers (1 fs=10−15s) plays a vital role to study the breaking and forming of bonds and movements of atoms in molecules e.g. during chemical reactions or dissociation processes in real time. The genuine time scale on which atoms move on Angstrom length scales, are typically ~100 femtoseconds. Time-resolved experiments are using well established pump-probe techniques with two synchronized femtosecond light pulses, where the pump pulse is preparing a coherent molecular wavepacket and triggering a change of the atomic configuration of the target, while the probe pulse measures that change...