title: Retrieving transient conformational molecular structure information from inner-shell photoionization of laser-aligned molecules.
abstract: We discuss a scheme to retrieve transient conformational molecular structure information using photoelectron angular distributions (PADs) that have averaged over partial alignments of isolated molecules. The photoelectron is pulled out from a localized inner-shell molecular orbital by an X-ray photon. We show that a transient change in the atomic positions from their equilibrium will lead to a sensitive change in the alignment-averaged PADs, which can be measured and used to retrieve the former. Exploiting the experimental convenience of changing the photon polarization direction, we show that it is advantageous to use PADs obtained from multiple photon polarization directions. A simple single-scattering model is proposed and benchmarked to describe the photoionization process and to do the retrieval using a multiple-parameter fitting method.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506, USA.
authors.forename: Xu
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506, USA.
authors.forename: Anh-Thu
authors.initials: AT
authors.lastname: Le
authors.affiliation: Department of Applied Physics, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210094, PR China.
authors.forename: Chao
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA.
authors.forename: R R
authors.initials: RR
authors.lastname: Lucchese
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506, USA.
authors.forename: C D
authors.initials: CD
authors.lastname: Lin