Conical intersections play a crucial role in the chemistry of most polyatomic molecules, ranging from the simplest bimolecular reactions to the photostability of DNA. The real-time study of the associated electronic dynamics poses a major challenge to the latest techniques of ultrafast measurement. We show that high-harmonic spectroscopy reveals oscillations in the electronic character that occur in nitrogen dioxide when a photoexcited wave packet crosses a conical intersection. At longer delays, we observe the onset of statistical dissociation dynamics. The present results demonstrate that high-harmonic spectroscopy could become a powerful tool to highlight electronic dynamics occurring along non-adiabatic chemical reaction pathways. 1The outcome of chemical reactions is determined by the valence electronic structure of molecules. Therefore, the elucidation of elementary reaction mechanisms requires an understanding of the valence electron dynamics. Recently developed techniques that are efficient in probing valence electron dynamics include attosecond transient absorption (1), extreme ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy (XUV-PES) (2), high-order harmonic spectroscopy (HHS) (3-5) and strong-field ionization (6). Both time-resolved PES (7) and time-resolved HHS are sensitive to valence electron dynamics through the molecular photoionization matrix elements.Electronic dynamics in molecules are particularly challenging to observe when they are strongly coupled to nuclear dynamics. Such situations often arise in polyatomic molecules where conical intersections between the potential energy surfaces induce very rapid radiationless transitions at particular nuclear configurations (see inset of Fig. 1) (8, 9). These features channel electronic excitation into atomic motion in such diverse contexts as the primary steps of vision (10) and the dynamics underlying electron transfer and the photostability of DNA bases (11).Here we show that high-harmonic spectroscopy reveals the variations in electronic character during the conical intersection dynamics and the subsequent dissociation of nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ). We chose NO 2 , a radical, because of its model status for theories of unimolecular dissociation (12-14) and conical intersection dynamics (15)(16)(17)(18)(19). Our results translate the previously recognized sensitivity of HHS to electronic structure into a tool for elucidating chemical reaction dynamics.High-harmonic spectroscopy can be factored into three steps: removal of an electron by an intense femtosecond laser field, acceleration of the electron in the laser field and photorecombination (20, 21). Each step contributes an amplitude and a phase to the emitted XUV radiation (20,(22)(23)(24)(25). The measurement relies on a coherent detection scheme in a transient grating geometry, using unexcited molecules as a local oscillator (4, 5). It is thus sensitive to 2 both amplitude and phase of the photorecombination matrix elements, a quantity that has recently attracted a lot of interest (26,27). Time-resolved...

By experimentally studying high-order harmonic beams generated in gases, we show how the spatial characteristics of these ultrashort extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) beams can be finely controlled when a single fundamental beam generates harmonics in a thin gas medium. We demonstrate that these XUV beams can be emitted as converging beams and thereby get focused after generation. We study this optics-less focusing using a spatially chirped beam that acts as a probe located inside the harmonic generation medium. We analyze the XUV beam evolution with an analytical model and obtain very good agreement with experimental measurements. The XUV foci sizes and positions vary strongly with the harmonic order, and the XUV waist can be located at arbitrarily large distances from the generating medium. We discuss how intense XUV fields can be obtained with optics-less focusing and how the order-dependent XUV beam characteristics are compatible with broadband XUV irradiation and attosecond science.