Skip to main content
An official website of the European UnionAn official EU website
European Commission logo
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS
CORDIS Web 30th anniversary CORDIS Web 30th anniversary
Content archived on 2024-06-18

XUV/X-ray lasers for ultrafast electronic control in chemistry

Objective

Advances in generating controlled few-cycle laser pulses and novel ultrashort XUV/Xray sources, from free electron laser (FEL)-based to attosecond high harmonic generation (HHG)-based, have opened completely new avenues for imaging electronic and nuclear dynamics in molecules, with exciting applications in physics, chemistry and biology. Processes such as ionization and dissociation of simple diatomic molecules can now be monitored in real time, but the access to few-femtosecond or attosecond time scales in the XUV/X-ray domain may also allow one to uncover and control the dynamics of elementary chemical processes such as, e.g. ultrafast charge migration, proton transfer, isomerization or multiple ionization, and to address new key questions about the role of attosecond coherent electron dynamics in chemical reactivity. The success of current experimental efforts in explaining these phenomena, present in many biological processes, is seriously limited due to the difficulty in their interpretation. In this respect, the implementation by the applicant’s group of nearly exact theoretical methods in supercomputers has made it possible to guide experimental research on simple systems. Such theoretical methods lie outside the traditional quantum chemistry realm since, e.g. they must accurately reproduce the time evolution of the coupled electronic and nuclear motions in the electronic and dissociative continua, including electron correlation and non-adiabatic effects. The necessary extension to systems of chemical interest, the current bottleneck in this field, requires extensive and novel theoretical developments along a similar direction. The aim of this project is to study the electronic and coupled electronic-nuclear dynamics in complex molecules at the attosecond or few-femtosecond time-scales, developing concepts and accurate theoretical tools to interpret the new generation of time-resolved experiments and to achieve ultrafast electronic control in chemistry.

Call for proposal

ERC-2011-ADG_20110209
See other projects for this call

Host institution

UNIVERSIDAD AUTONOMA DE MADRID
EU contribution
€ 2 447 736,00
Address
CALLE EINSTEIN 3 CIUDAD UNIV CANTOBLANCO RECTORADO
28049 Madrid
Spain

See on map

Region
Comunidad de Madrid Comunidad de Madrid Madrid
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Principal investigator
Fernando Martin Garcia (Prof.)
Links
Total cost
No data

Beneficiaries (1)