Measurements of Long-range Electronic Correlations During Femtosecond Diffraction Experiments Performed on Nanocrystals of BuckminsterfullereneRebecca A. Ryan 1, Sophie Williams 1, Andrew V. Martin 1, Ruben A. Dilanian 1, Connie Darmanin 2, Corey T. Putkunz 1, David Wood 3, Victor A. Streltsov 4, Michael W.M. Jones 5, Naylyn Gaffney 6, Felix Hofmann 7, Garth J. Williams 8, Sebastien Boutet 9, Marc Messerschmidt 10, M. Marvin Seibert 11, Evan K. Curwood 11, Eugeniu Balaur 2, Andrew G. Peele 5, Keith A. Nugent 2, Harry M. Quiney 1, Brian Abbey 2
1ARC Centre of Excellence in Advanced Molecular Imaging, School of Physics, University of Melbourne, 2Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence in Advanced Molecular Imaging, Department of Chemistry and Physics, La Trobe Institute for Molecular Sciences, La Trobe University, 3Department of Physics, Imperial College London, 4Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, 5Science and Engineering Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, 6Swinburne University of Technology, 7Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, 8Brookhaven National Laboratory, 9Linac Coherent Light Source, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, 10BioXFEL Science and Technology Center, 11Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics, Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, Uppsala University, 12Australian Synchrotron
We describe an experiment designed to probe the electronic damage induced in nanocrystals of Buckminsterfullerene (C60) by intense, femtosecond pulses of X-rays. The experiment found that, surprisingly, rather than being stochastic, the X-ray induced electron dynamics in C60 are highly correlated, extending over hundreds of unit cells within the crystals1.