Investigating Ultrafast Dynamics in Polyatomic Molecules with Inner-shell Ionization

The invention of free-electron lasers capable of producing intense pulses of short wavelength light has enabled new time-resolved studies into photo dynamics in a site-selective manner. By choosing a suitable photon energy, photoabsorption can be highly localized at an individual atomic orbital within a molecule. My talk will focus on a series of investigations into ultrafast processes using site-selective soft x-ray ionization and how these novel techniques offer unique information of phenomena like charge transfer and non-adiabatic coupling in polyatomic molecules. The talk will conclude with new opportunities to extend these techniques to understand the evolving molecular structures via correlation analysis.