Imaging collective quantum fluctuations of the structure of a complex molecule
- Benoît Richard
- Rebecca Boll
- Sourav Banerjee
- Julia M. Schäfer
- Zoltan Jurek
- Gregor Kastirke
- Kilian Fehre
- Markus S. Schöffler
- Nils Anders
- Thomas M. Baumann
- Sebastian Eckart
- Benjamin Erk
- Alberto De Fanis
- Reinhard Dörner
- Sven Grundmann
- Patrik Grychtol
- Max Hofmann
- Markus Ilchen
- Max Kircher
- Katharina Kubicek
- Maksim Kunitski
- Xiang Li
- Tommaso Mazza
- Severin Meister
- Niklas Melzer
- Jacobo Montano
- Valerija Music
- Yevheniy Ovcharenko
- Christopher Passow
- Andreas Pier
- Nils Rennhack
- Jonas Rist
- Daniel E. Rivas
- Daniel Rolles
- Ilme Schlichting
- Lothar Ph. H. Schmidt
- Philipp Schmidt
- Daniel Trabert
- Florian Trinter
- Rene Wagner
- Peter Walter
- Pawel Ziolkowski
- Artem Rudenko
- Michael Meyer
- Robin Santra
- Ludger Inhester
- Till Jahnke
2025-08-07
Because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the structure of a molecule fluctuates about its mean geometry, even in the ground state. Observing this fundamental quantum effect experimentally—particularly, revealing the collective nature of the structural quantum fluctuations—remains an unmet challenge for complex molecules. In this work, we achieved this for an 11-atom molecule by inducing its Coulomb explosion with an x-ray free-electron laser. We show that the structural fluctuations manifest themselves in correlated variations of ion momenta obtained through coincident detection of the atomic fragments from individual molecules. Our analysis scheme allows extracting these variations, despite our measurements covering only a fraction of the full 33-dimensional momentum space, thereby establishing a general approach for extracting information on high-dimensional structural dynamics using Coulomb explosion.