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IOP Publishing, Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, 20(48), p. 204002, 2015

DOI: 10.1088/0953-4075/48/20/204002

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Strongly aligned gas-phase molecules at Free-Electron Lasers

Journal article published in 2015 by Thomas Kierspel ORCID, Joss Wiese, Terry Mullins, Joseph Robinson, Andy Aquila, Anton Barty ORCID, Richard Bean, Rebecca Boll, Sébastien Boutet, Philip Bucksbaum ORCID, Henry N. Chapman, Lauge Christensen, Alan Fry, Mark Hunter, Jason E. Koglin and other authors.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

We demonstrate a novel experimental implementation to strongly align molecules at full repetition rates of free-electron lasers. We utilized the available in-house laser system at the coherent x-ray imaging beamline at the linac coherent light source. Chirped laser pulses, i.e., the direct output from the regenerative amplifier of the Ti:Sa chirped pulse amplification laser system, were used to strongly align 2, 5-diiodothiophene molecules in a molecular beam. The alignment laser pulses had pulse energies of a few mJ and a pulse duration of 94 ps. A degree of alignment of $〈 {\mathrm{cos}}^{2}{\theta }_{2{\rm{D}}}〉 =0.85$ was measured, limited by the intrinsic temperature of the molecular beam rather than by the available laser system. With the general availability of synchronized chirped-pulse-amplified near-infrared laser systems at short-wavelength laser facilities, our approach allows for the universal preparation of molecules tightly fixed in space for experiments with x-ray pulses.