Related papers: Soft x-rays induce femtosecond solid-to-solid phas…
Atomically thin graphene exhibits fascinating mechanical properties, although its hardness and transverse stiffness are inferior to those of diamond. To date, there hasn't been any practical demonstration of the transformation of…
The nature of the insulator-to-metal phase transition in vanadium dioxide (VO2) is one of the longest-standing problems in condensed-matter physics. Ultrafast spectroscopy has long promised to determine whether the transition is primarily…
The ability to optically initialize the electronic spin of the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center in diamond has long been considered a valuable resource to enhance the polarization of neighboring nuclei, but efficient polarization transfer to…
When x-rays penetrate soft matter, their phase changes more rapidly than their amplitude. In- terference effects visible with high brightness sources creates higher contrast, edge enhanced images. When the object is piecewise smooth (made…
Plasma surface modification was used to fabricate graphene on the top of insulating diamond-like carbon films. It is shown that by a combination of pulsed argon plasma treatment and thermal annealing at 350\degreeC is possible to achieve…
The unprecedented brilliance of X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) [1, 2] has enabled first studies of nonlinear interactions in the hard X-ray range. In particular, X-ray-optical mixing [3], X-ray second harmonic generation (XSHG) [4] and…
A new phasing algorithm has been used to determine the phases of diffuse elastic X-ray scattering from a non-periodic array of gold balls of 50 nm diameter. Two-dimensional real-space images, showing the charge-density distribution of the…
The timing of 503 solar flares observed simultaneously in hard X-rays, soft X-rays and H-alpha is analyzed. We investigated the start and the peak time differences in different wavelengths, as well as the differences between the end of the…
Significant research has focused on low-power stochastic devices built from memristive materials. These devices foster neuromorphic approaches to computational efficiency enhancement in merged biomimetic and CMOS architectures due to their…
Most ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are argued to be powered by supercritical accretion onto compact objects. One of the key questions regarding these objects is whether or not the hard X-rays are geometrically beamed toward the…
We present a microscopic theory for ultrafast control of solids with high-intensity terahertz frequency optical pulses. When resonant with selected infrared-active vibrations, these pulses transiently modify the crystal structure and lead…
Understanding melting in metals is a hot topic of present research. This may be accomplished by pumping the system with infrared (IR) laser radiation, and probing it with hard X-rays produced by an X-ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL). In this…
We measured transitions between the hyperfine levels of the electronic ground state of potassium-39 atoms (transition frequency: 460 MHz) as the atoms moved through a periodic magneto-static field produced above the magnetic-stripe domains…
In this letter we demonstrate the possibility to determine the temporal and spectral structure (spectrogram) of a complex light pulse exploiting the ultrafast switching character of a non-thermal photo-induced phase transition. As a proof,…
Black hole X-ray binaries show signs of non-thermal emission in the optical/near-infrared range. We analyze the optical/near-infrared SMARTS data on GX339$-$4 over the 2002--2011 period. Using the soft state data, we estimate the…
We perform a frequency-resolved analysis of electron dynamics in solids to obtain microscopic insight into linear and nonlinear optical phenomena. For the analysis, we first compute the electron dynamics under optical electric fields and…
Using long-range surface plasmon polaritons light can propagate in metal nano-scale waveguides for ultracompact opto-electronic devices. Gold is an important material for plasmonic waveguides, but although its linear optical properties are…
We numerically explore synthetic crystal diamond for realizing novel light sources in ranges which are up to now difficult to achieve with other materials, such as sub-10-fs pulse durations and challenging spectral ranges. We assess the…
Phase transitions driven by ultrashort laser pulses have attracted interest both for understanding the fundamental physics of phase transitions and for potential new data storage or device applications. In many cases these transitions…
Many systems in nature exhibit transitions between fluid-like states and solid-like states, or "jamming transitions". There is a strong theoretical foundation for understanding equilibrium phase transitions that involve solidification, or…