Atom-Billiards with X-Rays

A new Approach to look inside of Molecules

28-Sep-2020 - In 1921, Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery that light is quantized, interacting with matter as a stream of particles called photons. Since these early days of quantum mechanics, it is known that photons also possess momentum. The photon’s ability to transfer ...

Self-imaging of a molecule by its own electrons

Mapping the atomic motion during a molecular vibration

22-Sep-2020 - One of the long-standing goals of research on the light-induced dynamics of molecules is to observe time-dependent changes in the structure of molecules, which result from the absorption of light, as directly and unambiguously as possible. To this end, researchers have developed and applied a ...

How to generate and steer electrons in liquid water

Surprising results reveal a new aspect of extremely strong electric fields in liquid water

08-Sep-2020 - Water molecules undergo ultrafast dithering motions at room temperature and generate extremely strong electric fields in their environment. New experiments demonstrate how in presence of such fields free electrons are generated and manipulated in the liquid with the help of an external terahertz ...

Scientists synthesized light with new intrinsic chirality to tell mirror molecules apart

Let there be… a new light

30-Oct-2019 - Light is the fastest way to distinguish right- and left-handed chiral molecules, which has important applications in chemistry and biology. However, ordinary light only weakly senses molecular handedness. Researchers from the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy ...

Forward or backward? New pathways for protons in water or methanol

10-Oct-2019 - A collaborative ultrafast spectroscopy and ab initio molecular dynamics simulations study, as recently published by scientists of the Max Born Institute of Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy (MBI) and the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) in the Journal of the American ...

How molecules teeter in a laser field

21-Jan-2019 - When molecules interact with the oscillating field of a laser, an instantaneous, time-dependent dipole is induced. This very general effect underlies diverse physical phenomena such as optical tweezers, for which Arthur Ashkin received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018, as well as the spatial ...

Looking at molecules from two sides with table-top femtosecond soft-X-rays

03-Jan-2019 - X-ray spectroscopy provides direct access into the nature of chemical bonds, from which the outcome of chemical reactions can be understood. For this, intense activities both at x-ray source development and implementation of new measurement methods is pursued by key research labs. Researchers at ...

Electric polarization in the macroscopic world and electrons moving at atomic scales

New route for understanding and tailoring the properties of ferroelectric materials

30-Aug-2018 - Femtosecond x-ray experiments in combination with a new theoretical approach establish a direct connection between electric properties in the macroscopic world and electron motions on the time and length scale of atoms. The results open a new route for understanding and tailoring the properties ...

Wiggling atoms switch the electric polarization of crystals

16-Apr-2018 - Ferroelectric crystals display a macroscopic electric polarization, a superposition of many dipoles at the atomic scale which originate from spatially separated electrons and atomic nuclei. The macroscopic polarization is expected to change when the atoms are set in motion but the connection ...

A spinning top of light

05-Mar-2018 - Short, rotating pulses of light reveal a great deal about the inner structure of materials. An international team of physicists led by Prof. Misha Ivanov of the Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy (MBI) has now developed a new method for precisely characterising ...