1Institute of Atomic and Molecular Physics, Jilin University, Changchun 130012, China 2Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, Beijing 100088, China 3School of Physics, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710049, China
Abstract:Imaging the charge distributions and structures of molecules and clusters will promote the understanding of the dynamics of the quantum system. Here, we report a method by using an Ar atom as a tip to probe the charge distributions of benzene (Bz) cations in gas phase. Remarkably, the measured charge distributions of Bz$^{+}$ ($\delta_{_{\scriptstyle \rm H}}=0.204$, $\delta_{_{\scriptstyle \rm C}}=-0.037$) and Bz$ ^{2+}$ ($\delta_{_{\scriptstyle \rm H}}=0.248$, $\delta_{_{\scriptstyle \rm C}}=0.0853$) agree well with the calculated Mulliken distributions, and the structures of Bz$_{2}$ is reconstructed by using the measured charge distributions. The structures of two Bz$_{2}$ isomers (T-shaped and PD isomers) can be resolved from the measured inter-molecular potential $V(R)$ between two Bz ions, and the structures of Bz dimer agree well with the theoretical predictions.
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See Supplemental Materials for more details about the experimental setup, the simulations, and additional data from experiments and the quantum chemistry calculations
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