Imaging molecular structures with high-energy photoelectrons produced by extreme ultraviolet pulses

Abstract

We have investigated the diffraction spectra of photoelectrons from one-photon single ionization of diatomic molecules by ultrashort extreme ultraviolet pulses. The result shows that the diffraction patterns strongly depend on the internuclear distances of molecules. With these diffraction patterns, we succeed in measuring the transient internuclear distances of small-distance molecules with a high precision. This provides a simple and efficient method for imaging molecular transient structures, avoiding the complicated recovering process of the diffraction pattern in the imaging with rescattered electrons.