Quantum state tomography of molecules by ultrafast diffraction

Authors

Ming Zhang, Peking University
Shuqiao Zhang, Peking University
Yanwei Xiong, University of Nebraska–LincolnFollow
Hankai Zhang, Peking University
Anatoly A. Ischenko, MIREA - Russian Technological University (RTU MIREA)
Oriol Vendrell, Universität Heidelberg
Xiaolong Dong, Peking University
Xiangxu Mu, Peking University
Martin Centurion, University of Nebraska - LincolnFollow
Haitan Xu, Southern University of Science and TechnologyFollow
R. J.Dwayne Miller, University of TorontoFollow
Zheng Li, Peking UniversityFollow

ORCID IDs

Yanwei Xiong http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9412-4447

Martin Centurion http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5662-2293

Anatoly A. Ischenko http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1532-377X

Zheng Li http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0329-1275

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

12-1-2021

Citation

NATURE COMMUNICATIONS (2021) 12:5441

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25770-6

Comments

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,

Abstract

Ultrafast electron diffraction and time-resolved serial crystallography are the basis of the ongoing revolution in capturing at the atomic level of detail the structural dynamics of molecules. However, most experiments capture only the probability density of the nuclear wavepackets to determine the time-dependent molecular structures, while the full quantum state has not been accessed. Here, we introduce a framework for the preparation and ultrafast coherent diffraction from rotational wave packets of molecules, and we establish a new variant of quantum state tomography for ultrafast electron diffraction to characterize the molecular quantum states. The ability to reconstruct the density matrix, which encodes the amplitude and phase of the wavepacket, for molecules of arbitrary degrees of freedom, will enable the reconstruction of a quantum molecular movie from experimental x-ray or electron diffraction data.