A bright light for ultrafast snapshots of materials
Friday, June 12, 2015 - 06:00
in Physics & Chemistry
If you want to understand how novel phases emerge in correlated materials, including high-temperature superconductivity and nanoscale electronic order, you can obtain completely new viewpoints by taking 'snapshots' of underlying rapid electronic interactions. One way to do this is by delivering pulses of extremely short-wavelength UV light to a material and deriving information based on the energy and direction of travel of the emitted electrons. However, generating pulsed extreme-UV (XUV) light with the required properties for such applications is difficult to achieve.