%0 Journal Article
%T Strongly aligned gas-phase molecules at Free-Electron Lasers
%A Thomas Kierspel
%A Joss Wiese
%A Terry Mullins
%A Joseph Robinson
%A Andy Aquila
%A Anton Barty
%A Richard Bean
%A Rebecca Boll
%A S¨¦bastien Boutet
%A Philip Bucksbaum
%A Henry N. Chapman
%A Lauge Christensen
%A Alan Fry
%A Mark Hunter
%A Jason E. Koglin
%A Mengning Liang
%A Valerio Mariani
%A Andrew Morgan
%A Adi Natan
%A Vladimir Petrovic
%A Daniel Rolles
%A Artem Rudenko
%A Kirsten Schnorr
%A Henrik Stapelfeldt
%A Stephan Stern
%A Jan Th£¿gersen
%A Chun Hong Yoon
%A Fenglin Wang
%A Sebastian Trippel
%A Jochen K¨¹pper
%J Physics
%D 2015
%I arXiv
%R 10.1088/0953-4075/48/20/204002
%X We demonstrate a novel experimental implementation to strongly align molecules at full repetition rates of free-electron lasers. We utilized the available in-house laser system at the coherent x-ray imaging beamline at the Linac Coherent Light Source. Chirped laser pulses, i. e., the direct output from the regenerative amplifier of the Ti:Sa chirped pulse amplification laser system, were used to strongly align 2,5-diiodothiophene molecules in a molecular beam. The alignment laser pulses had pulse energies of a few mJ and a pulse duration of 94 ps. A degree of alignment of $\left<\cos^2\!\theta_{2D}\right>$ = 0.85 was measured, limited by the intrinsic temperature of the molecular beam rather than by the available laser system. With the general availability of synchronized chirped-pulse-amplified near-infrared laser systems at short-wavelength laser facilities, our approach allows for the universal preparation of molecules tightly fixed in space for experiments with x-ray pulses.
%U http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.03650v3