Non-Adiabatic Electronic and Vibrational Ring-Opening Dynamics resolved with Attosecond Core-Level Spectroscopy

Non-adiabatic dynamics and conical intersections play a central role in the chemistry of most polyatomic molecules, ranging from isomerization to heterocyclic ring opening and avoided photo-damage of DNA. Studying the underpinning correlated dynamics of electronic and nuclear wave packets is a major challenge in real-time and, many times involves optically dark transient states. We show that attosecond core-level spectroscopy reveals the pathway dynamics of neutral furan across its conical intersections and dark states. Our method measures electronic-nuclear correlations to detect the dephasing of electronic coherence due to nuclear motion and identifies the ring-opened isomer as the dominant product. These results demonstrate the efficacy of attosecond core level spectroscopy as a potent method to investigate the real-time dynamics of photochemical reaction pathways in complex molecular systems.