Revealing secrets of exploding clusters
Tuesday, February 25, 2014 - 06:31
in Physics & Chemistry
The investigation of cluster explosion dynamics under intense extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) pulses has so far been limited to large scale facilities like free-electron lasers. In a recent publication, it was shown that the research on clusters is now also possible with intense XUV pulses obtained in a laboratory-scale environment with a newly developed light source that makes use of the high-order harmonic generation process. For the first time, the formation of high-lying Rydberg atoms by electron-ion recombination during the cluster expansion initially triggered by an intense XUV pulse was identified, giving new insight into the cluster dissociation process.