Speaker
Description
Ultrafast X-ray crystallography has emerged as a powerful technique to resolve electron density dynamics on femtosecond time scale in molecular crystals, using X-ray Free Electron Lasers. However, a multitude of ultrafast phenomena, in particular optical non-linear processes, remain to be fully established for this application. There are multiple avenues to combine the techniques of optical crystallography, non-linear optical spectroscopy and ultrafast X-ray crystallography. These give rise to non-linear optical crystallography [1-5], coherent control methodology [6], and also the combination of coherence theory developed for Raman spectroscopy together with crystallographic data [7]. I will also discuss technical developments and predictions for future capabilities once we will have the availability of high repetition rate XFEL instruments.
1) van Thor JJ (2019) Coherent two-dimensional electronic and infrared crystallography, The Journal of Chemical Physics, Vol: 150, 124113
2) Bressan G, van Thor JJ, (2021) Theory of two-dimensional spectroscopy with intense laser fields, The Journal of Chemical Physics, Vol: 154, Pages: 1-10
3) Hutchison CDM, Fadini A, van Thor JJ (2022) Linear and Non-Linear Population Retrieval with Femtosecond Optical Pumping of Molecular Crystals for the Generalised Uniaxial and Biaxial Systems, APPLIED SCIENCES-BASEL, Vol: 12
4) van Thor JJ (2019) Advances and opportunities in ultrafast X-ray crystallography and ultrafast structural optical crystallography of nuclear and electronic protein dynamics Struct. Dyn. 6, 050901
5) Marius Kaucikas, Karim Maghlaoui, Jim Barber, Thomas Renger and Jasper J van Thor (2016) Ultrafast infrared observation of exciton equilibration from oriented single crystals of photosystem II. Nature Communications. 7, 13977
6) Christopher D.M. Hutchison, et al. Optical control of ultrafast structural dynamics in a fluorescent protein. (2023) Nature Chemistry. 15, 1607–1615
7) Samuel Perrett et al. Application of Density Matrix Wigner Transforms for Ultrafast Macromolecular and Chemical X-ray Crystallography. (2024) J. Chem. Phys. 160(10):100901
