Abstract

Sources of intense femtosecond pulses at short wavelengths such as high intensity high harmonic sources are intense enough to drive a sizable fraction (>10%) of a sample to a well-defined excited state or to a coherent superposition of states. These dynamically evolving excited states can then be probed with pump-probe, multi-color or non-linear photoionization techniques. In general electronic excited states are short lived. The most important tool necessary to carry out this task is high harmonic sources optimized for producing very intense short pulses of EUV photons in the 5 – 60 eV energy range. We will present the application of the intense EUV pulses to study femtosecond dynamics of molecules such as methanol, carbon dioxide and ethylene in the gas as well as light induced self-organization of nanoparticles at interfaces. We use a variety of techniques including time-of-flight, electron spectroscopy and velocity map imaging to unravel the ultrafast chemical dynamics.

© 2016 Optical Society of America