X-ray movies reveal how intense lasers tear a buckyball apart
X-rays captured a buckyball breaking apart under powerful lasers, uncovering hidden steps in its rapid collapse.
Understanding how many atoms move and interact inside laser-driven polyatomic molecules is essential for any attempt to guide chemical reactions using intense light. With the help of ultrashort, high-power X-ray pulses created by accelerator-based free electron lasers (FELs), scientists can now directly observe how strong laser fields rapidly reshape molecular structures. To explore these effects, researchers turned to the well-known football-like molecule "Buckminsterfullerene" C60. Teams from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPI-PKS) in Dresden, working with collaborators at the Max Born Institute (MBI) in Berlin as well as groups in Switzerland, USA and Japan, studied C60 experimentally and theoretically. Their experiment at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory produced the first direct images of how C60 behaves when exposed to strong laser fields.
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