We report observations of nanosecond nanometer scale heterogeneous dynamics in a free flowing colloidal jet revealed by ultrafast x-ray speckle visibility spectroscopy. The nanosecond double-bunch mode of the Linac Coherent Light Source free electron laser enabled the production of pairs of femtosecond coherent hard x-ray pulses. By exploring the anisotropic summed speckle visibility which relates to the correlation functions, we are able to evaluate not only the average particle flow rate in a colloidal nanoparticle jet, but also the heterogeneous flow field within. The reported methodology presented here establishes the foundation for the study of nano- and atomic-scale heterogeneous fluctuations in complex matter using x-ray free electron laser sources.
We use X-Ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy to investigate the structural relaxation process in a metallic glass on the atomic length scale. We report evidence for a dynamical crossover between the supercooled liquid phase and the metastable glassy state, suggesting different origins of the relaxation process across the transition. Furthermore, using different cooling rates we observe a complex hierarchy of dynamic processes characterized by distinct aging regimes. Strong analogies with the aging dynamics of soft glassy materials, such as gels and concentrated colloidal suspensions, point at stress relaxation as a universal mechanism driving the relaxation dynamics of out-of-equilibrium systems.
Polarization dependent vanadium L edge X-ray absorption spectra of BaVS$_3$ single crystals are measured in the four phases of the compound. The difference between signals with the polarization textbf{E}$perp$textbf{c} and textbf{E}$parallel$textbf{c} (linear dichroism) changes with temperature. Besides increasing intensity of one of the maxima, a new structure appears in the pre-edge region below the metal-insulator transition. More careful examination brings to light that the changes start already with pretransitional charge density wave fluctuations. Simple symmetry analysis suggests that the effect is related to rearrangements in $E_{g}$ and $A_{1g}$ states, and is compatible with the formation of four inequivalent V sites along the V-S chain.
We have implemented the newly-introduced, coherence-based technique of x-ray near-field speckle (XNFS) at 8-ID-I at the Advanced Photon Source. In the near field regime of high-brilliance synchrotron x-rays scattered from a sample of interest, it turns out, that, when the scattered radiation and the main beam both impinge upon an x-ray area detector, the measured intensity shows low-contrast speckles, resulting from interference between the incident and scattered beams. We built a micrometer-resolution XNFS detector with a high numerical aperture microscope objective and demonstrate its capability for studying static structures and dynamics at longer length scales than traditional far field x-ray scattering techniques. Specifically, we characterized the structure and dynamics of dilute silica and polystyrene colloidal samples. Our study reveals certain limitations of the XNFS technique, which we discuss.
Recently developed circularly polarized X-ray light sources can probe ultrafast chiral electronic and nuclear dynamics through spatially localized resonant core transitions. We present simulations of time-resolved circular dichroism (TRCD) signals given by the difference of left and right circularly polarized X-ray probe transmission following an excitation by a circularly polarized optical pump with variable time delay. Application is made to formamide which is achiral in the ground state and assumes two chiral geometries upon optical excitation to the first valence excited state. Probes resonant with various K-edges (C, N and O) provide different local windows onto the parity breaking geometry change thus revealing enantiomer asymmetry.
Infrared light scattering methods have been developed and employed to non-invasively monitor human cerebral blood flow (CBF). However, the number of reflected photons that interact with the brain is low when detecting blood flow in deep tissue. To tackle this photon-starved problem, we present and demonstrate the idea of interferometric speckle visibility spectroscopy (ISVS). In ISVS, an interferometric detection scheme is used to boost the weak signal light. The blood flow dynamics are inferred from the speckle statistics of a single frame speckle pattern. We experimentally demonstrated the improvement of measurement fidelity by introducing interferometric detection when the signal photon number is insufficient. We apply the ISVS system to monitor the human CBF in situations where the light intensity is $sim$100-fold less than that in common diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) implementations. Due to the large number of pixels ($sim 2times 10^5$) used to capture light in the ISVS system, we are able to collect a similar number of photons within one exposure time as in normal DCS implementations. Our system operates at a sampling rate of 100 Hz. At the exposure time of 2 ms, the average signal photon electron number is $sim$0.95 count/pixel, yielding a single pixel interferometric measurement signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of $sim$0.97. The total $sim 2times 10^5$ pixels provide an expected overall SNR of 436. We successfully demonstrate that the ISVS system is able to monitor the human brain pulsatile blood flow, as well as the blood flow change when a human subject is doing a breath holding task.