Extraction of the Bond Lengths of Aligned Acetylene using Laser-Induced Electron Diffraction

Imaging the dynamics of molecular processes, i.e. the creation of a so-called \u27molecular movie\u27, requires temporal and spatial resolutions on the few-femtosecond and sub-Ångström scales, respectively. Traditional diffraction techniques are currently temporal limited on the hundreds of femtoseconds level. Laser induced electron diffraction (LIED), on the other hand, is based on using strong-field ionisation to probe an objects\u27 structure with its own rescattered electrons. It therefore has an intrinsic temporal resolution on the attosecond to few-femtosecond scale. LIED has been used to image the dynamics of diatomic molecules over 5 fs [1] but the real goal is to apply it to polyatomic molecules that have many possible ionisation and fragmentation channels