Abstract
Recent advances in high-order harmonic generation have made it possible to use a tabletop-scale setup to produce spatially and temporally coherent beams of light with bandwidth spanning 12 octaves, from the ultraviolet up to x-ray photon energies . Here we demonstrate the use of this light for x-ray-absorption spectroscopy at the - and -absorption edges of solids at photon energies near 1 keV. We also report x-ray-absorption spectroscopy in the water window spectral region (284–543 eV) using a high flux high-order harmonic generation x-ray supercontinuum with in 1% bandwidth, 3 orders of magnitude larger than has previously been possible using tabletop sources. Since this x-ray radiation emerges as a single attosecond-to-femtosecond pulse with peak brightness exceeding bandwidth, these novel coherent x-ray sources are ideal for probing the fastest molecular and materials processes on femtosecond-to-attosecond time scales and picometer length scales.
- Received 24 July 2017
- Revised 10 December 2017
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.093002
© 2018 American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Synopsis
X-Ray Absorption Spectroscopy on a Tabletop
Published 1 March 2018
A laser-based setup can be used to perform x-ray spectroscopy with a precision rivaling that of experiments at large-scale synchrotron facilities.
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