Visualizing the strong field–induced molecular breakup of C 60 via x-ray diffraction
- Kirsten Schnorr
- Sven Augustin
- Ulf Saalmann
- Georg Schmid
- Arnaud Rouzée
- Razib Obaid
- Andre AlHaddad
- Nora Berrah
- Cosmin I. Blaga
- Christoph Bostedt
- Manuel Cardosa-Gutierrez
- Gabriella Carini
- Ryan Coffee
- Louis F. DiMauro
- Philip Hart
- Yuta Ito
- Katharina Kubicek
- Yoshiaki Kumagai
- Jochen Küpper
- Yu Hang Lai
- Hannes Lindenblatt
- Ruth A. Livingstone
- Severin Meister
- Robert Moshammer
- Koji Motomura
- Thomas Möller
- Kaz Nakahara
- Timur Osipov
- Gaurav Pandey
- Dipanwita Ray
- Francoise Remacle
- Daniel Rolles
- Jan Michael Rost
- Ilme Schlichting
- Rüdiger Schmidt
- Simone Techert
- Florian Trost
- Kiyoshi Ueda
- Joachim Ullrich
- Marc J.J. Vrakking
- Julian Zimmermann
- Claus Peter Schulz
- Thomas Pfeifer
2025-11-21
Laser-driven dynamics in polyatomic molecules poses a complex many-body problem. Understanding intense light-matter interaction is crucial for steering intramolecular quantum dynamical processes. Here, we record time-resolved x-ray diffraction images of C 60 molecules during and after their interaction with intense near-infrared fields, giving direct access to structural changes of the molecules and their fragmentation in real time. Tuning the intensity of the excitation pulses, we uncover a transition from a weak-field regime of excited but stable molecules to a high-field regime dominated by Coulomb explosion. In the transition region, the molecules expand by up to 50% of their initial size within just 140 fs, with major fragmentation only setting in afterward. This work demonstrates that x-ray diffractive imaging is capable of retrieving time-resolved structural information of large molecules reshaped by intense laser fields. Laser-driven fragmentation is a first step toward observing molecular processes modified by laser fields of increasing intensity.