In quantum systems, coherent superpositions of electronic states evolve on ultrafast timescales (few femtosecond to attosecond, 1 as = 0.001 fs = 10 −18 s), leading to a time dependent charge den...
The conversion of photon energy into other energetic forms in molecules is accompanied by charge moving on ultrafast timescales. We directly observe the charge motion at a specific site in an electronically excited molecule using time-resolved x-ray …
Photoexcited molecules convert light into chemical and mechanical energy through changes in electronic and nuclear structure that take place on femtosecond timescales. Gas phase ultrafast electron diffraction (GUED) is an ideal tool to probe the …
The possibility of suddenly ionized molecules undergoing extremely fast electron hole (or hole) dynamics prior to significant structural change was first recognized more than 20 years ago and termed charge migration. The accurate probing of ultrafast …
Water is one of the most important, yet least understood, liquids in nature. Many anomalous properties of liquid water originate from its well-connected hydrogen bond network1, including unusually efficient vibrational energy redistribution and …
Short-wavelength free-electron lasers with their ultrashort pulses at high intensities have originated new approaches for tracking molecular dynamics from the vista of specific sites. X-ray pump X-ray probe schemes even allow to address individual …
We present the first investigation of excited state dynamics by resonant Auger–Meitner spectroscopy (also known as resonant Auger spectroscopy) using the nucleobase thymine as an example. Thymine is photoexcited in the UV and probed with X-ray photon …
In this paper, we report X-ray absorption and core-level electron spectra of the nucleobase derivative 2-thiouracil at the sulfur L1- and L2,3-edges. We used soft X-rays from the free-electron laser FLASH2 for the excitation of isolated molecules and …