Echoes in space and time

Echo in mountains is a well-known phenomenon, where an acoustic pulse is mirrored by the rocks, often with reverberating recurrences. For spin echoes in magnetic resonance and photon echoes in atomic and molecular systems, the role of the mirror is played by a second, time-delayed pulse that is able to reverse the flow of time and recreate the original impulsive event. Recently, alignment and orientation echoes were discussed in terms of rotational-phase-space filamentation, and they were optically observed in laserexcited molecular gases. Here, we observe hitherto unreported fractional echoes of high order, spatially rotated echoes, and the counterintuitive imaginary echoes at negative times. Coincidence Coulomb explosion imaging is used for a direct spatiotemporal analysis of various molecular alignment echoes, and the implications to echo phenomena in other fields of physics are discussed.