Intermolecular interactions probed by rotational dynamics in gas-phase clusters.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 38777851.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-024-48822-z and PMC identifier 11111446.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
The rotational dynamics of a molecule is sensitive to neighboring atoms or molecules, which can be used to probe the intermolecular interactions in the gas phase. Here, we real-time track the laser-driven rotational dynamics of a single N<sub>2</sub> molecule affected by neighboring Ar atoms using coincident Coulomb explosion imaging. We find that the alignment trace of N-N axis decays fast and only persists for a few picoseconds when an Ar atom is nearby. We show that the decay rate depends on the rotational geometry of whether the Ar atom stays in or out of the rotational plane of the N<sub>2</sub> molecule. Additionally, the vibration of the van der Waals bond is found to be excited through coupling with the rotational N-N axis. The observations are well reproduced by solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation after taking the interaction potential between the N<sub>2</sub> and Ar into consideration. Our results demonstrate that environmental effects on a molecular level can be probed by directly visualizing the rotational dynamics.