Mainz 2026 – scientific programme

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MO: Fachverband Molekülphysik

MO 28: Interaction with VUV and X-ray light I (joint session A/MO)

MO 28.1: Invited Talk

Thursday, March 5, 2026, 14:30–15:00, N 2

IR-laser induced dressing signatures in helium nanodroplets probed by coherent diffractive imaging — •Tom von Scheven, Björn Kruse, and Thomas Fennel — Institute of Physics, University of Rostock, Albert-Einstein-Str. 23-24, D-18059 Rostock, Germany

Single-shot coherent diffractive imaging (CDI) enables the capture of a full diffraction image of a nanostructure using a single flash of XUV or X-ray light. The resulting scattering image encodes both the geometry and the optical properties of the target. So far, this method has mainly been employed for ultrafast structural characterization [1]. However, CDI can also be utilized to resolve ultrafast optical property changes caused by e.g. transient excitation from nonlinear scattering [2], or by illumination with a second ultra-short laser pulse.

Here, we explore the expected signatures for the latter case theoretically, where simultaneous exposure to a strong IR field can induce transient optical properties. To this end, the effective optical properties, emerging from the laser dressing, are extracted from the dipole response of a local quantum description based on an atom-like solution of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. In a second step, we apply the well-known Mie-solution, to use the obtained optical properties in order to describe the resulting scattering process at helium nanodroplets and compare the results to recent experiments [3].

[1] I. Barke et al., Nat. Commun. 6, 6187 (2015)

[2] B. Kruse et al., J. Phys.: Photonics 2, 024007 (2020)

[3] J. Schäfer-Zimmermann et al., arXiv, 2508.19936 (2025)

Keywords: transient optical properties; laser dressing; time-dependent Schrödinger equation; coherent diffractive imaging; Mie-scattering