TY - JOUR
T1 - Following the Birth of a Nanoplasma Produced by an Ultrashort Hard-X-Ray Laser in Xenon Clusters
AU - Kumagai, Yoshiaki
AU - Fukuzawa, Hironobu
AU - Motomura, Koji
AU - Iablonskyi, Denys
AU - Nagaya, Kiyonobu
AU - Wada, Shin Ichi
AU - Ito, Yuta
AU - Takanashi, Tsukasa
AU - Sakakibara, Yuta
AU - You, Daehyun
AU - Nishiyama, Toshiyuki
AU - Asa, Kazuki
AU - Sato, Yuhiro
AU - Umemoto, Takayuki
AU - Kariyazono, Kango
AU - Kukk, Edwin
AU - Kooser, Kuno
AU - Nicolas, Christophe
AU - Miron, Catalin
AU - Asavei, Theodor
AU - Neagu, Liviu
AU - Schöffler, Markus S.
AU - Kastirke, Gregor
AU - Liu, Xiao Jing
AU - Owada, Shigeki
AU - Katayama, Tetsuo
AU - Togashi, Tadashi
AU - Tono, Kensuke
AU - Yabashi, Makina
AU - Golubev, Nikolay V.
AU - Gokhberg, Kirill
AU - Cederbaum, Lorenz S.
AU - Kuleff, Alexander I.
AU - Ueda, Kiyoshi
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to the late Makoto Yao for his invaluable contributions to the present work. The experiments were performed at SPring-8 Angstrom Compact free electron LAser (SACLA) with the approval of JASRI and the program review committee (No. 2015B8057). This study was supported by the X-ray Free Electron Laser Utilization Research Project and the X-ray Free Electron Laser Priority Strategy Program of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT), by the Proposal Program of SACLA Experimental Instruments of RIKEN, by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI Grants No. JP21244042, No.JP23241033, No.JP15K17487, and No.JP16K05016, and by the Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials (IMRAM) project. H.F. and K.U. acknowledge support by the Dynamic Alliance for Open Innovation Bridging Human, Environment and Materials. D.I. and Y.I. acknowledge support by IMRAM, Tohoku University. K.N. and S.W. acknowledge support by the Research Program of Dynamic Alliance for Open Innovation Bridging Human, Environment and Materials in Network Joint Research Center for Materials and Devices. T. Takanashi acknowledges support by JSPS KAKENHI Grant No.JP16J002270. D.Y. acknowledges support by the Grant-in-Aid of Tohoku University Institute for Promoting Graduate Degree Programs Division for Interdisciplinary Advanced Research and Education. T.N. acknowledges support by the Research Program for Next Generation Young Scientists of Dynamic Alliance for Open Innovation Bridging Human, Environment and Materials in Network Joint Research Center for Materials and Devices. A.I.K. thanks DFG for financial support. M.S. and G.K. gratefully acknowledge financial support by BMBF (Grant No.05K16RF3) and the DFG Research Unit 1789 Grant No.203306641. Y.K. was partially supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences Division. K. Kooser acknowledges the financial support provided by the Estonian Research Council (Grant No.PUT735) and from the Visl Foundation of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.
PY - 2018/8/2
Y1 - 2018/8/2
N2 - X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) made available a new regime of x-ray intensities, revolutionizing the ultrafast structure determination and laying the foundations of the novel field of nonlinear x-ray optics. Although earlier studies revealed nanoplasma formation when an XFEL pulse interacts with any nanometer-scale matter, the formation process itself has never been decrypted and its timescale was unknown. Here we show that time-resolved ion yield measurements combined with a near-infrared laser probe reveal a surprisingly ultrafast population (∼12 fs), followed by a slower depopulation (∼250 fs) of highly excited states of atomic fragments generated in the process of XFEL-induced nanoplasma formation. Inelastic scattering of Auger electrons and interatomic Coulombic decay are suggested as the mechanisms populating and depopulating, respectively, these excited states. The observed response occurs within the typical x-ray pulse durations and affects x-ray scattering, thus providing key information on the foundations of x-ray imaging with XFELs.
AB - X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) made available a new regime of x-ray intensities, revolutionizing the ultrafast structure determination and laying the foundations of the novel field of nonlinear x-ray optics. Although earlier studies revealed nanoplasma formation when an XFEL pulse interacts with any nanometer-scale matter, the formation process itself has never been decrypted and its timescale was unknown. Here we show that time-resolved ion yield measurements combined with a near-infrared laser probe reveal a surprisingly ultrafast population (∼12 fs), followed by a slower depopulation (∼250 fs) of highly excited states of atomic fragments generated in the process of XFEL-induced nanoplasma formation. Inelastic scattering of Auger electrons and interatomic Coulombic decay are suggested as the mechanisms populating and depopulating, respectively, these excited states. The observed response occurs within the typical x-ray pulse durations and affects x-ray scattering, thus providing key information on the foundations of x-ray imaging with XFELs.
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U2 - 10.1103/PhysRevX.8.031034
DO - 10.1103/PhysRevX.8.031034
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85051511629
VL - 8
JO - Physical Review X
JF - Physical Review X
SN - 2160-3308
IS - 3
M1 - 031034
ER -