Twice in a row selected for “Highlight in Optics”

Optics & Photonics has recently announced its list of the thirty 2015 highlighted articles of the year in its December issue. Our study, which appeared in Nature Communications, ICFO researchers Dr. Michael Pullen, Benjamin Wolter, Matthias Baudisch, and Dr. Michael Hemmer, led by ICREA Prof. at ICFO Dr. Jens Biegert, have developed the recipe to take ‘snapshots’ of polyatomic molecular structure at the atomic level and with attosecond temporal resolution. This technique of using a mid-IR laser with a 3D electron and ion coincidence detection system, called laser-induced electron diffraction (LIED), provides an accessible and robust route towards imaging many ultrafast processes in complex molecules with a temporal resolution that was considered impossible only a few years ago. The results set the scene for the first “molecular movie” with simultaneous picometer and few-femtosecond resolutions.