Tomographic reconstruction of photoelectron elliptical dichroism in chiral terpenes and terpenoids

Velocity-map imaging was combined with a novel tomographic reconstruction algorithm to investigate photoelectron elliptical dichroism (PEELD) in the 400 nm multiphoton ionization of the chiral molecules (+)-fenchone, (+)-α-pinene, and (+)-3-carene. Building on our recent study of the related species camphor [C. Sparling et al., J. Chem. Phys. 159, 214301 (2023)], we again find that cylindrical symmetry-breaking contributions to the photoelectron angular distributions play a non-negligible role. Furthermore, the angular structure of the PEELD response exhibits a more complex dependency on the ellipticity of the ionizing light than previously observed. Nevertheless, these features can be qualitatively rationalized using an extension of the simple two-basis-function model employed in our earlier work. Taken together, these results further underscore the value of efficient and robust tomographic approaches for interrogating PEELD phenomena across a range of different molecules.