Detecting Electron Motion in Atoms and Molecules

Abstract

The detection of spatial and temporal electronic motion by scattering of subfemtosecond pulses of 10 keV electrons from coherent superpositions of electronic states of both H and T2(+) is investigated. For the H atom, we predict changes in the diffraction images that reflect the time-dependent effective radius of the electronic charge density. For an aligned T2(+) molecule, the diffraction image changes reflect the time-dependent localization or delocalization of the electronic charge density.