Chasing the Ultrafast Electron and Nuclear Dynamics in Molecular System: Towards Molecular Movies
ABSTRACT :
Many foundation experiments of Quantum mechanics were performed on atomic and molecular systems. The electron and nuclear dynamics in such systems play a vital role in understanding of the various physical and chemical processes occurring in nature. The nuclear dynamics is ranging from picosecond to femtosecond time domain whereas the electron dynamics is in attosecond time scale. The processes occurring in this time domain are named as ultrafast processes. Understanding the time-resolved ultrafast processes has opened a new direction in atomic and molecular physics, where the evolution dynamics and subsequence changes in molecular structure are probed during the reactions. This has led to the possibility of controlling chemical reaction for molecular engineering. The probing the electron and nuclear dynamics in time domain has given an opportunity to make molecular movies which give us dynamical, structural and products information in given molecular reactions. In this talk, I would like to discuss about the ultrafast processes, collapsing of molecular wave packets as per the Copenhagen interpretation, the Young double slit-type interference in polyatomic molecules and probing the molecular wave packets. Finally, the molecular alignment and probing the electronic and nuclear wave packets by pump-probe scheme will be discussed and a movie on molecular alignment will be shown.