Visualization of charge, energy, or signal transfer

Carriers of charge, energy, or more generally of information can be electrons, vibrational excitations, ions, or even groups of nuclei. Today, the most challenging time scale is that of the electron dynamics, on an elementary level in atoms or small molecular systems. Novel laser systems allow for measurements reaching sub-100 attosecond resolution for probing electron dynamics, for example in Auger processes, in electron tunneling, or in molecular tomography. MUST has established an attosecond ‘facility’ in Ursula Keller's group at ETH Zurich and through collaborative efforts the attosecond beamline (i.e. attoline) has been open to other members of the MUST network (e.g. Hengsberger/Osterwalder and Chergui). In larger molecular systems, where the electron transfer is described more traditionally on the level of the Marcus Theory, and can be studied by more established techniques, many open questions need to be addressed, both from the fundamental but also from the application point of view.

Again some efforts aim at manipulating and controlling such transport phenomena through shaped light pulses, most notably in the THz regime where Stark shifting of eigenstates can be maintained for time scales on which these transport phenomena occur.



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