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From Few Cycle Femtosecond Pulse To Single Attosecond Pulse Controlling And Tracking Electron Dynamics With Attosecond Precision
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Book Synopsis From Few-cycle Femtosecond Pulse to Single Attosecond Pulse-controlling and Tracking Electron Dynamics with Attosecond Precision by : He Wang
Download or read book From Few-cycle Femtosecond Pulse to Single Attosecond Pulse-controlling and Tracking Electron Dynamics with Attosecond Precision written by He Wang and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The few-cycle femtosecond laser pulse has proved itself to be a powerful tool for controlling the electron dynamics inside atoms and molecules. By applying such few-cycle pulses as a driving field, single isolated attosecond pulses can be produced through the high-order harmonic generation process, which provide a novel tool for capturing the real time electron motion. The first part of the thesis is devoted to the state of the art few-cycle near infrared (NIR) laser pulse development, which includes absolute phase control (carrier-envelope phase stabilization), amplitude control (power stabilization), and relative phase control (pulse compression and shaping). Then the double optical gating (DOG) method for generating single attosecond pulses and the attosecond streaking experiment for characterizing such pulses are presented. Various experimental limitations in the attosecond streaking measurement are illustrated through simulation. Finally by using the single attosecond pulses generated by DOG, an attosecond transient absorption experiment is performed to study the autoionization process of argon. When the delay between a few-cycle NIR pulse and a single attosecond XUV pulse is scanned, the Fano resonance shapes of the argon autoionizing states are modified by the NIR pulse, which shows the direct observation and control of electron-electron correlation in the temporal domain.
Book Synopsis Laser Spectroscopy - Proceedings Of The Xvii International Conference by : Edward A Hinds
Download or read book Laser Spectroscopy - Proceedings Of The Xvii International Conference written by Edward A Hinds and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2005-12-15 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the latest volume in the series of proceedings from the biannual International Conference on Laser Spectroscopy, one of the leading conferences in the field. Over its 34-year history, this conference series has been a forum for the announcement of many new developments in laser physics and laser spectroscopy and more recently laser cooling of atoms and quantum information processing. The proceedings include contributions from the invited speakers and a selection of contributed papers.A particular theme for this volume is precision measurements. Motivated by the untapped potential for vast improvements in accuracy offered by atomic systems, this subject has advanced tremendously in recent years by new developments in laser technology. This has been recognized by the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to two of the pioneers in the field and contributors to these proceedings, J L Hall and T W Hänsch.The other main theme of the proceedings is cold atoms and quantum degenerate gases. This conference marked the 10th anniversary of the first announcement of an atomic Bose-Einstein Condensate at the 12th International Conference on Laser Spectroscopy with a contribution from Nobel Laureate Eric Cornell.
Book Synopsis Science by : John Michels (Journalist)
Download or read book Science written by John Michels (Journalist) and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 1000 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Femtosecond Laser Spectroscopy by : Peter Hannaford
Download or read book Femtosecond Laser Spectroscopy written by Peter Hannaford and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2005-12-27 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The embryonic development of femtoscience stems from advances made in the generation of ultrashort laser pulses. Beginning with mode-locking of glass lasers in the 1960s, the development of dye lasers brought the pulse width down from picoseconds to femtoseconds. The breakthrough in solid state laser pulse generation provided the current reliable table-top laser systems capable of average power of about 1 watt, and peak power density of easily watts per square centimeter, with pulse widths in the range of four to eight femtoseconds. Pulses with peak power density reaching watts per square centimeter have been achieved in laboratory settings and, more recently, pulses of sub-femtosecond duration have been successfully generated. As concepts and methodologies have evolved over the past two decades, the realm of ultrafast science has become vast and exciting and has impacted many areas of chemistry, biology and physics, and other fields such as materials science, electrical engineering, and optical communication. In molecular science the explosive growth of this research is for fundamental reasons. In femtochemistry and femtobiology chemical bonds form and break on the femtosecond time scale, and on this scale of time we can freeze the transition states at configurations never before seen. Even for n- reactive physical changes one is observing the most elementary of molecular processes. On a time scale shorter than the vibrational and rotational periods the ensemble behaves coherently as a single-molecule trajectory.
Book Synopsis Improved Control of Single Cycle Pulse Generation by Molecular Modulation by : Andrea Mihaela Burzo
Download or read book Improved Control of Single Cycle Pulse Generation by Molecular Modulation written by Andrea Mihaela Burzo and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Generation of reproducible attosecond (10−18s) pulses is an exciting goal: in the same way as femtosecond pulses were used to make "movies" of the atomic motion in molecules, attosecond pulses could "uncover" the motion of electrons around nuclei. In this dissertation, we have suggested new ideas that will allow improving one scheme for obtaining such ultra-short pulses: The molecular modulation technique. In a theoretical proposal called Raman Additive technique, we have suggested a method that will allow (with a proper phase stabilization of generated sidebands) to obtain reproducible waveforms of arbitrary shape. An exciting range of possibilities could open up - not only for absolute phase control or sub-cycle shape control, but also for investigation of multiphoton ionization rates as a function of the sub-cycle shape. We have elaborated on the latter subject in another theoretical project, where we have exploited the unique feature of such ultrashort laser pulses, which is synchronization with molecular motion (rotational or vibrational), in order to investigate photoionization of molecules. From experimental point of view, a different construction of driving lasers than previously employed led to establishment of larger molecular coherences at higher operating pressure than in previous experiments. This resulted in simultaneous generation of rotational and vibrational sidebands with only two fields applied. In another experimental proposal using rotational transition in deuterium we have shown that employing a hollow waveguide instead of normal Raman cell improves the efficiency of the generation process. By optimizing gas pressure and waveguide geometry to compensate the dispersion, the method can be extended to efficiently generate Raman sidebands at a much lower energy of driving fields than previously employed. At the end, a very exciting possibility for controlling the molecular motion in a Raman driven system will be shown. Based on the interference effects (EIT like) that take place inside of a molecule, selectivity of different degrees of freedom can be achieved (for example switching from rotational-vibrational motion to pure rotational).
Book Synopsis Few-Cycle Laser Pulse Generation and Its Applications by : Franz X. Kärtner
Download or read book Few-Cycle Laser Pulse Generation and Its Applications written by Franz X. Kärtner and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2004-09-14 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book covers the physics, technology and applications of short pulse laser sources that generate pulses with durations of only a few optical cycles. The basic design considerations for the different systems such as lasers, parametric amplifiers and external compression techniques which have emerged over the last decade are discussed to give researchers and graduate students a thorough introduction to this field. The existence of these sources has opened many new fields of research that were not possible before. These are UV and EUV generation from table-top systems using high-harmonic generation, frequency metrology enabling optical frequency counting, high-resolution optical coherence tomography, strong-field ultrafast solid-state processes and ultrafast spectroscopy, to mention only a few. Many new applications will follow. The book attempts to give a comprehensive, while not excessive, introduction to this exciting new field that serves both experienced researchers and graduate students entering the field. The first half of the book covers the current physical principles, processes and design guidelines to generate pulses in the optical range comprising only a few cycles of light. Such as the generation of relatively low energy pulses at high repetition rates directly from the laser, parametric generation of medium energy pulses and high-energy pulses at low repetition rates using external compression in hollow fibers. The applications cover the revolution in frequency metrology and high-resolution laser spectroscopy to electric field synthesis in the optical range as well as the emerging field of high-harmonic generation and attosecond science, high-resolution optical imaging and novel ultrafast dynamics in semiconductors. These fields benefit from the strong electric fields accompanying these pulses in solids and gases during events comprising only a few cycles of light.
Book Synopsis Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Attosecond Science and Technology by : Argenti
Download or read book Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Attosecond Science and Technology written by Argenti and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access volume brings together selected papers from the 8th International Conference on Attosecond Science and Technology. The contributions within represent the latest advances in attosecond science, covering recent progress in ultrafast electron dynamics in atoms, molecules, clusters, surfaces, solids, nanostructures and plasmas, as well as the generation of sub-femtosecond XUV and X-ray pulses, either through table-top laser setups or with X-ray free-electron lasers. In addition to highlighting key advances and outlining the state of the field, the conference and its proceedings serve to introduce junior researchers to the community, promote collaborations, and represent the global and topical diversity of the field.
Book Synopsis Study on Generation of Attosecond Pulse with Polarization Gating by : Shambhu Ghimire
Download or read book Study on Generation of Attosecond Pulse with Polarization Gating written by Shambhu Ghimire and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finally, in order to temporarily characterize the attosecond pulses we designed and built an "Attosecond Streak Camera". Most of such cameras to date are limited to measuring a 1 dimensional energy spectrum and have only a few degrees of acceptance angle. Our camera is capable of measuring 2d momentum of the photoelectrons with large acceptance angle, for example ∼65° at the photoelectron of energy ∼15 eV. Recently, we observed the sidebands in addition to the main peaks in their laser assisted XUV photoelectron spectrum. The single attosecond pulses, after being characterized with this high speed camera, can be used to explore the dynamics of electrons at the attosecond scale.
Book Synopsis Attosecond Nanophysics by : Peter Hommelhoff
Download or read book Attosecond Nanophysics written by Peter Hommelhoff and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-01-30 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first broad and in-depth overview of current research in attosecond nanophysics, covering the field of active plasmonics via attosecond science in metals and dielectrics to novel imaging techniques with the highest spatial and temporal resolution. The authors are pioneers in the field and present here new developments and potential novel applications for ultra-fast data communication and processing, discussing the investigation of the natural timescale of electron dynamics in nanoscale solid state systems. Both an introduction for starting graduate students, as well as a look at the current state of the art in this hot and emerging field.
Book Synopsis Generation and Characterization of Sub-70 Isolated Attosecond Pulses by : Qi Zhang
Download or read book Generation and Characterization of Sub-70 Isolated Attosecond Pulses written by Qi Zhang and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 115 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dynamics occurring on microscopic scales, such as electronic motion inside atoms and molecules, are governed by quantum mechanics. However, the Schrödinger equation is usually too complicated to solve analytically for systems other than the hydrogen atom. Even for some simple atoms such as helium, it still takes months to do a full numerical analysis. Therefore, practical problems are often solved only after simplification. The results are then compared with the experimental outcome in both the spectral and temporal domain. For accurate experimental comparison, temporal resolution on the attosecond scale is required. This had not been achieved until the first demonstration of the single attosecond pulse in 2001. After this breakthrough, "attophysics" immediately became a hot field in the physics and optics community. While the attosecond pulse has served as an irreplaceable tool in many fundamental research studies of ultrafast dynamics, the pulse generation process itself is an interesting topic in the ultrafast field. When an intense femtosecond laser is tightly focused on a gaseous target, electrons inside the neutral atoms are ripped away through tunneling ionization. Under certain circumstances, the electrons are able to reunite with the parent ions and release photon bursts lasting only tens to hundreds of attoseconds. This process repeats itself every half cycle of the driving pulse, generating a train of single attosecond pulses which lasts longer than one femtosecond. To achieve true temporal resolution on the attosecond time scale, single isolated attosecond pulses are required, meaning only one attosecond pulse can be produced per driving pulse.
Book Synopsis Exploring the World with the Laser by : Dieter Meschede
Download or read book Exploring the World with the Laser written by Dieter Meschede and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 799 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edition contains carefully selected contributions by leading scientists in high-resolution laser spectroscopy, quantum optics and laser physics. Emphasis is given to ultrafast laser phenomena, implementations of frequency combs, precision spectroscopy and high resolution metrology. Furthermore, applications of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics are widely covered. This book is dedicated to Nobel prize winner Theodor W. Hänsch on the occasion of his 75th birthday. The contributions are reprinted from a topical collection published in Applied Physics B, 2016. Selected contributions are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com. Please see the copyright page for further details.
Book Synopsis McGraw-Hill Yearbook of Science and Technology by : McGraw-Hill
Download or read book McGraw-Hill Yearbook of Science and Technology written by McGraw-Hill and published by McGraw-Hill's Yearbook of Scie. This book was released on 2005-12 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the most trusted sources for high quality information, authoritative reviews of the most significant recent developments in science and technology. Edited and illustrated for clarity and ease of understanding by non-specialist and expert alike.
Book Synopsis Femtosecond Optical Frequency Comb: Principle, Operation and Applications by : Jun Ye
Download or read book Femtosecond Optical Frequency Comb: Principle, Operation and Applications written by Jun Ye and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-06-15 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last few years, there has been a convergence between the fields of ultrafast science, nonlinear optics, optical frequency metrology, and precision laser spectroscopy. These fields have been developing largely independently since the birth of the laser, reaching remarkable levels of performance. On the ultrafast frontier, pulses of only a few cycles long have been produced, while in optical spectroscopy, the precision and resolution have reached one part in Although these two achievements appear to be completely disconnected, advances in nonlinear optics provided the essential link between them. The resulting convergence has enabled unprecedented advances in the control of the electric field of the pulses produced by femtosecond mode-locked lasers. The corresponding spectrum consists of a comb of sharp spectral lines with well-defined frequencies. These new techniques and capabilities are generally known as “femtosecond comb technology. ” They have had dramatic impact on the diverse fields of precision measurement and extreme nonlinear optical physics. The historical background for these developments is provided in the Foreword by two of the pioneers of laser spectroscopy, John Hall and Theodor Hänsch. Indeed the developments described in this book were foreshadowed by Hänsch’s early work in the 1970s when he used picosecond pulses to demonstrate the connection between the time and frequency domains in laser spectroscopy. This work complemented the advances in precision laser stabilization developed by Hall.
Book Synopsis Modeling Generation and Characterization of Attosecond Pulses by : Siddharth Bhardwaj
Download or read book Modeling Generation and Characterization of Attosecond Pulses written by Siddharth Bhardwaj and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Generation of high-order harmonics has emerged as a powerful technique for the generation of broadband coherent radiation in the EUV regime. This has lead to the development of table-top EUV sources that can produce attosecond pulses. These pulses can serve as a probe to resolve atomic attosecond dynamics and image atomic orbitals and molecular motion. Due to high spatial and temporal coherence, high-order harmonic radiation can also be used to seed free electron lasers, which allow the generation of high-intensity X-ray radiation that can be used for imaging biomolecules. Since the first observation of high-order harmonics, effort has been made to accurately model both the generation and the characterization of attosecond pulses. Work on the modeling of high harmonic generation can be divided into two parts: (a) description of the interaction between the JR pulse and atoms that leads to emission of attosecond pulses (the single atom response) and (b) modeling of the propagation of attosecond pulses by accounting for macroscopic phase matching effects. In this work, we will focus on the single atom response which can be calculated either by numerically solving the time dependent Schrodinger equation (TDSE) or through the semi-classical three step model (TSM). In Chapter 2, the theory of light-atom interaction will be reviewed with the focus on the calculation of the dipole trasition matrix element (DTME) in the strong field formalism. It will be shown that the choice of the basis states - Volkov states and Coulomb Volkov states - to describe electrons in the continuum is crucial to the accuracy of DTME calculation. In Chapter 3, the TSM will be derived from the Schrodinger equation by using the saddle point approximation. Through this derivation, the quantum mechanical laser-atom interaction is reduced to a semi-classical model comprising of ionization, propagation and recombination . The numerical scheme for solving the TDSE will be discussed. It will then be used to demonstrate the generation of isolated attosecond pulses from non-sinusoidal sub-cycle pulses. The results of ADK and non-adiabatic ionization models will be compared with that from numerical TDSE, and then used to calculate the harmonic spectra in the tunneling and multi-photon ionization regimes. The recombination step of the TSM, which plays a crucial role in determining the qualitative shape of the high-order harmonic spectrum, will be investigated in Chapter 4. A commonly observed feature of Argon's high-order harmonic spectrum is the presence of a minimum at around 50 eV called the Cooper minimum. The minimum in the high-order harmonic spectrum has been attributed to the minimum in the recombination amplitude. The recombination amplitude will be calculated - in the strong field formalism - using length and acceleration form for two choices of continuum electron wavefunction description (Volkov and Coulomb-Volkov). Attosecond pulse characterization techniques, which are an extension of the subpicosecond pulse characterization technique like FROG and SPIDER, rely on the photoionization process to transfer the amplitude and phase information of the attosecond pulse to the photoelectron spectrum. For accurate pulse characterization, it is crucial to model the photoionization process accurately. Since photoionization and recombination are reverse processes, the improvements in the calculation of the recombination amplitude in Chapter 4, can be used to improve the model function of the pulse retrieval algorithm. It will be shown that the proposed improvements are crucial for accurate characterization of low energy EUV pulses.
Book Synopsis Ultrafast Phenomena XII by : Thomas Elsässer
Download or read book Ultrafast Phenomena XII written by Thomas Elsässer and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2001 with total page 746 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I: Coherent Control.- The Odyssey of Kent Wilson: Holding Molecules in the Light.- The Kent Wilson Group in the 1990s.- Algorithms for Closed Loop Ultrafast Control of Quantum Dynamics.- Control of Quantum Dynamics by Adaptive Femtosecond Pulse Shaping.- Optimal Control of Two-Photon Transitions: Bright and Dark Femtosecond Pulses Designed by a Self-Learning Algorithm.- Feedback Optimization of Molecular States Using a Parametrization in Frequency and Time Domain.- Controlling and Probing Impulsively Induced Ground State Vibrational Dynamics.- Dynamics and Coherent Control of Condensed Phase Vibrational Coherences.- Spatiotemporal Coherent Control.- Coherent Control and Nonlinear Interactions of Semiconductor Cavity Polaritons.- Coherent Control of XUV Radiation.- Enhancement of k? Yield from Femtosecond Laser Produced Plasmas by Automated Control of Plasma Parameters.- II: Lasers for Ultrashort Pulses.- Challenges and Limitations on Generating Few Cycle Laser Pulses Directly from Oscillators.- Extremely Flexible and Accurate Chirp-Compensation for 75-MHz Repetitive Glass-Fiber Output of a More-Than 100-THz Bandwidth: Generation of a-Few4Optical-Cycle Transform-Limited Pulses.- 14-fs Pulses at 1.3- m Generated from an All-Solid-State Cr: Forsterite Laser.- Smooth Dispersion Compensation: Novel Chirped Mirrors with Suppressed Dispersion Oscillations.- Dispersion Management over one Octave with Tilted-Front-Interface Chirped Mirrors.- A Prism-Pair-Formed Pulse Shaper Compresses Optical Pulses to the 6 fs Regime.- Correcting the Failure of the Slowly Varying Amplitude Approximation for Short Pulses.- Precise Control of the Pulse-to-Pulse Carrier-Envelope Phase in a Mode-Locked Laser.- Carrier Envelope Offset Phase Stabilization for Few-Cycle Nonlinear Optics.- Sub-10 fs Light Pulses with Stabilized Carrier-Envelope Phase: Optical Waveform Synthesis.- Frequency Domain Control of Femtosecond Pulse Trains with Fabry-Perot Reference Cavities for Optical Frequency Metrology.- Nonlinear Optcal Method for Determining the Absolute Carrier Phase of a Laser Pulse.- Generation of Relativistic Intensity Pulses at 300 Hz Repetition Rate.- Reflection Double Pass Ti: Sapphire Continuous-Wave Amplifier Delivering 5.77 W Average Power, 82 MHz Repetition Rate, 100 fs Pulse.- Chirped Pulse Amplification for Ultraviolet Femtosecond Pulses Using Ce: LiCAF Crystal.- Parabolic Pulses from Yb: Fiber Amplifiers: A New Paradigm for High Power Ultrashort Pulse Generation.- Generation, Amplification and Characterization of Tunable Visible Ultrashort Shaped Pulses.- Synthesis of Supershort UV Pulses Using Phase-Locked Raman Side-Band Generation.- Generation and Measurement of Ultrafast Tunable VUV Light.- III: Pulse Characterization, Shaping and Measurement Techniques.- Autocorrelation Measurement of Femtosecond Optical Pulses Using Two-Photon-Induced Photocurrent in a Photomultiplier Tube.- Precision and Accuracy of Ultrashort Optical Pulse Measurement Using SPIDER.- Highly Simplified Ultrashort Pulse Measurement.- Time-Gated FROG: A New Technique for Studying the Build-Up of Optical Pulse Field in Mode-Locked Ultrafast Lasers.- Measuring the Intensity and Phase of Ultrabroadband Continuum.- Amplitude and Phase Measurement of Mid-IR Femtosecond Pulses Using XFROG.- Rapid Retrieval of Ultrashort Pulse Amplitude and Phase from a Sonogram Trace.- Simultaneous Two-Dimensional Space and Time Measurement of Ultrashort Optical Pulses Based on Spatial Spectral Interferometry.- Reliability of Fourier-Transform Spectral Interferometry.- Direct Measurement of Spectral Phase of Femtosecond Pulses Using Optical Parametric Effect.- Ultrashort Pulse Characterization by Frequency Resolved Pump Probe.- Attosecond Cross Correlation Technique.- Unbalanced Multiphoton Autocorrelation Techniques for fs Pulse Measurements in the Near IR.- Unbalanced Third-Order Correlations for Characterizing the Intensity and Phase of Femtosecond Pulses.- Spectral Phase Correlator for Coded Wavefo
Book Synopsis Frequency-Resolved Optical Gating: The Measurement of Ultrashort Laser Pulses by : Rick Trebino
Download or read book Frequency-Resolved Optical Gating: The Measurement of Ultrashort Laser Pulses written by Rick Trebino and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Frequency-Resolved Optical-Gating (FROG) technique has revolutionized our ability to measure and understand ultrashort laser pulses. This book contains everything you need to know to measure even the shortest, weakest, or most complex ultrashort laser pulses. Whether you're an undergrad or an advanced researcher, you'll find easy-to-understand descriptions of all the key ideas behind all the FROG techniques, all the practical details of pulse measurement, and many new directions of research. This book is not like any other scientific book. It is a lively discussion of the basic concepts. It is an advanced treatment of research-level issues.
Book Synopsis Connecting Lab-Based Attosecond Science with FEL Research by :
Download or read book Connecting Lab-Based Attosecond Science with FEL Research written by and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last few years laboratory-scale femtosecond laser-based research using XUV light has developed dramatically following the successful development of attosecond laser pulses by means of high-harmonic generation. Using attosecond laser pulses, studies of electron dynamics on the natural timescale that electronic processes occur in atoms, molecules and solids can be contemplated, providing unprecedented insight into the fundamental role that electrons play in photo-induced processes. In my talk I will briefly review the present status of the attosecond science research field in terms of present and foreseen capabilities, and discuss a few recent applications, including a first example of the use of attosecond laser pulses in molecular science. In addition, I will discuss very recent results of experiments where photoionization of dynamically aligned molecules is investigated using a high-harmonics XUV source. Photoionization of aligned molecules becomes all the more interesting if the experiment is performed using x-ray photons. Following the absorption of x-rays, ejected photoelectrons can be used as a probe of the (time-evolving) molecular structure, making use of intra-molecular electron diffraction. This amounts, as some have stated, to "illuminating the molecule from within". I will present the present status of our experiments on this topic making use of the FLASH free electron laser in Hamburg. Future progress in this research field not only depends on the availability of better and more powerful light sources, but also requires sophisticated detector strategies. In my talk I will explain how we are trying to meet some of the experimental challenges by using the Medipix family of detectors, which we have already used for time- and space-resolved imaging of electrons and ions.
