A shortlived SPPS facility is still producing papers – this week it’s the PRL paper by Aaron Lindenberg and some 28 co-authors ” X-Ray Diffuse Scattering Measurements of Nucleation Dynamics at Femtosecond Resolution” Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 135502 (2008).
This is yet another pump-probe experiment, where pump is a femtosecond laser which ablates/melts a crystal, and a probe is a sub-picosecond x-ray pulse from SPPS. X-ray probe pulse length is still a limiting parameter in overall time resolution of such pump-probe setups. This experiment had a time resolution of 700 fs, but in the near future at XFEL facilities such as LCLS the time resolution will approach tens of femtosecond.
Lindenberg and coworkers were able to look at both high-angle and small-angle diffuse scattering resulting in ablation process in this time-resolved mode. Their data indicates presence of short-lived nanoscale voids (shown in green in the figure on the right) in the liquid state caused by the laser pulse, and these voids merge together to form larger voids over the timescale of 20 ps or so – claims supported by molecular dynamics simulations. While their data was taken in reciprocal space, by recording ensemble-averaged structure factor S(q) at various time delays from the laser pulse, in the future one could envision fully inverting the speckle patterns shown in the figure above, to obtain a real-space images of the nanoscale voids.
