Imaging Electronic Fluxes via Time-Resolved X-Ray Scattering

Imaging of electron charge distribution is crucial to understand different instances during chemical reactions such as conformational changes, charge migration, and bond formation and breakage. According to the quantum continuity equation, the flow of electrons is accompanied by associated electronic fluxes. The latter offers a wealth of information and has played a decisive role for understanding chemical reaction mechanisms. However, the notion of electronic fluxes has been restricted to theoretical modelling  and there is no general way to probe them directly in experiment. In this work, we demonstrate theoretically real-space and real-time imaging of electronic fluxes associated with charge migration using time-resolved x-ray scattering. For this purpose, we consider oriented benzene as a test system in which a pump pulse induces adiabatic charge migration and ultrashort x-ray pulses probe the electronic fluxes accompanying charge migration.