Photodissociation of aqueous I3− observed with liquid-phase ultrafast mega-electron-volt electron diffraction
Kathryn Ledbetter, Elisa Biasin, J. Pedro F. Nunes, Martin Centurion, Kelly J. Gaffney, M. Kozina, Ming‐Fu Lin, Xiaozhe Shen, Jie Yang, Xijie Wang, Thomas Wolf, Amy A. Cordones
Abstract
Developing femtosecond resolution methods for directly observing structural dynamics is critical to understanding complex photochemical reaction mechanisms in solution. We have used two recent developments, ultrafast mega-electron-volt electron sources and vacuum compatible sub-micron thick liquid sheet jets, to enable liquid-phase ultrafast electron diffraction (LUED). We have demonstrated the viability of LUED by investigating the photodissociation of tri-iodide initiated with a 400 nm laser pulse. This has enabled the average speed of the bond expansion to be measured during the first 750 fs of dissociation and the geminate recombination to be directly captured on the picosecond time scale.