Imaging collective quantum fluctuations of the structure of a complex molecule
Benoît Richard, Rebecca Boll, Sourav Banerjee, Julia Schäfer, Zoltán Jurek, Gregor Kastirke, K. Fehre, M. Schoeffler, N. Anders, Th. Baumann, S. Eckart, Benjamin Erk, A. De Fanis, R. Doerner, Sven Grundmann, Patrik Grychtol, M. Hofmann, Markus Ilchen, M. Kircher, Katharina Kubiček, M. Kunitski, Xiang Li, Tommaso Mazza, Severin Meister, N. Melzer, J. Montaño, Valerija Music, Yevheniy Ovcharenko, Christopher Passow, A. Pier, Nils Rennhack, J. Rist, Daniel E. Rivas, Daniel Rolles, Ilme Schlichting, Lothar Schmidt, Philipp Schmidt, D. Trabert, Florian Trinter, R. Wagner, Peter Walter, Pawel Ziółkowski, Artem Rudenko, Michael Meyer, Robin Santra, Ludger Inhester, T. Jahnke
Abstract
Because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the structure of a molecule fluctuates about its mean geometry, even in the ground state. Observing this fundamental quantum effect experimentally-particularly, revealing the collective nature of the structural quantum fluctuations-remains an unmet challenge for complex molecules. In this work, we achieved this for an 11-atom molecule by inducing its Coulomb explosion with an x-ray free-electron laser. We show that the structural fluctuations manifest themselves in correlated variations of ion momenta obtained through coincident detection of the atomic fragments from individual molecules. Our analysis scheme allows extracting these variations, despite our measurements covering only a fraction of the full 33-dimensional momentum space, thereby establishing a general approach for extracting information on high-dimensional structural dynamics using Coulomb explosion.