Published in
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
,
Joss Wiese,
Terry Mullins,
Joseph Robinson,
Andy Aquila,
Anton Barty ,
Richard Bean,
Rebecca Boll,
Sébastien Boutet,
Philip Bucksbaum ,
Henry N. Chapman,
Lauge Christensen,
Alan Fry,
Mark Hunter,
Jason E. Koglin
and other authors.
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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.