Enormous enhancement of molecular ionization at high x-ray intensity

The ultra-intense and ultra-short x-ray pulses provided by X-ray Free-Electron Lasers (XFELs) sequentially ionize molecular samples many times. In this context, we have recently discovered that under intense x-ray radiation the total charge of a molecule is enhanced compared to the sum of charges of its constituent isolated atoms[2, 3]. We report here on new theoretical results[5] for iodobenzene (C6H5I) that show an even stronger ionization enhancement than previously observed for iodomethane (CH3I)[3].