TY - JOUR A1 - Bedurke, Florian A1 - Klamroth, Tillmann A1 - Krause, Pascal A1 - Saalfrank, Peter T1 - Discriminating organic isomers by high harmonic generation T2 - The journal of chemical physics : bridges a gap between journals of physics and journals of chemistr N2 - High Harmonic Generation (HHG) is a nonlinear optical process that provides a tunable source for high-energy photons and ultrashort laser pulses. Recent experiments demonstrated that HHG spectroscopy may also be used as an analytical tool to discriminate between randomly oriented configurational isomers of polyatomic organic molecules, namely, between the cis- and trans-forms of 1,2-dichloroethene (DCE) [M. C. H. Wong et al., Phys. Rev. A 84, 051403 (2011)]. Here, we suggest as an economic and at the same time a reasonably accurate method to compute HHG spectra for polyatomic species, Time-Dependent Configuration Interaction Singles (TD-CIS) theory in combination with extended atomic orbital bases and different models to account for ionization losses. The HHG spectra are computed for aligned and unaligned cis- and trans-DCE. For the unaligned case, a coherent averaging over possible rotational orientations is introduced. Furthermore, using TD-CIS, possible differences between the HHG spectra of cis- and trans-DCE are studied. For aligned molecules, spectral differences between cis and trans emerge, which can be related to their different point group symmetries. For unaligned, randomly oriented molecules, we also find distinct HHG spectra in partial agreement with experiment. In addition to HHG response in the frequency space, we compute time-frequency HHG spectra to gain insight into which harmonics are emitted at which time. Further differences between the two isomers emerge, suggesting time-frequency HHG as another tool to discriminate configurational isomers. Y1 - 2019 UR - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/49005 SN - 0021-9606 SN - 1089-7690 VL - 150 IS - 23 PB - American Institute of Physics CY - Melville ER -