Attosecond science, established at the dawn of this millennium and recently recognized by the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L’Huillier, has given access to the natural time scale of electronic motion in matter. For this reason, since its early days, scientists have sought potential applications in other fields of science where electron dynamics play an important role. One of them is chemistry, because the way molecules behave, e.g., forming or breaking bonds, is ultimately dictated by electronic motion, which paves the way for nuclear motion. Since the first observation in 2010 of attosecond electron dynamics in molecular hydrogen, more and more complex systems have been under scrutiny, leading to the birth of the new discipline of Attosecond Chemistry or Attochemistry. High-harmonic generation (HHG) sources and X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs) can now routinely generate light pulses of sub-femtosecond duration, thus providing access to the attosecond time scale. This has required the joint effort of physicists and chemists─both experimentalists and theoreticians─in order to develop ever-improved methods for both visualization and control of electron dynamics. Physical chemistry, and chemistry in general, can greatly benefit from these developments, because new, unforeseen possibilities to control chemical reactions may arise in the future. These are the goals of the AttoChem (https://attochem.qui.uam.es/) and X-Lites (https://opticalscience.osu.edu/x-lites) international networks, which gather the most prominent research groups working in Attosecond Chemistry.The present Virtual Special Issue provides a collection of original scientific papers that address problems of special relevance in attochemistry, in particular, the electron and charge dynamics triggered by extreme ultraviolet (XUV) attosecond pulses, strong IR fields, or attosecond or few-femtosecond X-ray pulses generated in XFELs; the electron dynamics associated with the ionization process itself; and the ultrafast nuclear dynamics that coexist or follow the electron dynamics induced by the above sources.

The journal of physical chemistry / A 128(24), 4761 - 4764 (2024). doi:10.1021/acs.jpca.4c03136

Published by American Chemical Society, Washington, DC