Published in

American Association for the Advancement of Science, Ultrafast Science, (3), 2023

DOI: 10.34133/ultrafastscience.0015

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Identification of the Decay Pathway of Photoexcited Nucleobases

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Red circle
Preprint: archiving forbidden
Red circle
Postprint: archiving forbidden
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

The identification of the decay pathway of the nucleobase uracil after being photoexcited by ultraviolet light has been a long-standing problem. Various theoretical models have been proposed but yet to be verified. Here, we propose an experimental scheme to test the theoretical models of gas phase uracil decay mechanism by a combination of ultrafast x-ray spectroscopy, x-ray diffraction, and electron diffraction methods. Incorporating the signatures of multiple probing methods, we demonstrate an approach that can identify the dominant mechanism of the geometric and electronic relaxation of the photoexcited uracil molecule among several candidate models.