What can time-resolved diffraction tell us about transient species?: excited-state structure determination at atomic resolution.
The author describes his work for which he coined the word 'photocrystallography', a technique which consists of using a laser to pump, or excite, a molecular crystal while the X-ray diffractometer probes its structure at the atomic level. The technique is being used to study highly reactive excited molecules that exist for just millionths or even billionths of a second using very intense light sources at the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory.
Coppens
Philip
P
Department of Chemistry, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-3000, USA. coppens@acsu.buffalo.edu