Measurement and Control of Ultrafast Electronic Coherence

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The project is concerned with the measurement of attosecond time-scale electron dynamics associated with electronic wavepackets (superpositions) formed e.g. in suddenly ionised and suddenly excited neutral molecules. It will seek to apply these measurements to both isolated gas phase molecules and condensed phase systems. The goal will be to gain a better understanding of the interactions that lead to electronic state decoherence of the wavepacket initially excited and to understand how the charge migrates within the quantum system where it may undergo oscillatory motion. The basic tool we will use are attosecond time domain soft X-ray pulses. The main thrust will be carrying out the measurements using both in-house HHG set-ups and the X-ray FELS e.g. LCLS, free electron laser in Stanford, California, but other XFELs will be employed if they offer the required capabilities. In a second phase of the work strategies to control the evolution of the electronic coherences using additional external fields will be investigated. There is strong scope for accompanying theoretical work to interpret the experiments