Imaging charge and energy transfer in molecules using free-electron lasers

Charge and energy transfer reactions drive numerous important processes in physics, chemistry and biology, with applications ranging from X-ray astrophysics to artificial photosynthesis and molecular electronics. Experimentally, the central goal in studies of transfer phenomena is to trace the spatial localization of charge at a given time. Because of their element and site sensitivity, ultrafast X-rays provide a promising tool to address this goal. In this talk I will discuss several experiments where free-electron lasers were employed to study charge and energy transfer dynamics in fragmenting molecules. In a first example, we used intense, 70 femtosecond 1.5 keV pulses from the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) to study distance dependence of electron transfer in laser-dissociated methyl iodide molecules. Inducing well-localized positive charge on the heavy iodine atom, we observe signature of electron transition from the separated methyl group up to the distances of 35 atomic units. In a complementary experiment, we studied charge exchange between two partners in a dissociating molecular iodine employing a pump-probe arrangement with two identical 90 eV pulses from the Free-Electron LASer in Hamburg (FLASH). In both cases, the effective spatial range of the electron transfer can be reasonably described by a classical over-the-barrier model developed for ion-atom collisions. Finally, I will discuss a time-resolved measurement on non-local relaxation mechanism based on a long-range energy transfer, the so-called interatomic Coulombic decay.