Transient gratings

Nature Photonics has just published an article describing the X-ray transient grating spectroscopy, an ultrafast nonlinear spectroscopic technique, demonstrated by an international team involving the Laboratoire Hubert Curien (Jérémy Rouxel), the EPFL (Majed Chergui), the PSI (Cris Svetina), the FERMI free electron laser (Claudio Masciovecchio) and the MIT (Keith Nelson) among others. The scientists used the Swiss X-ray Free Electron Laser (SwissFEL) at PSI.

The technique generates a grating of excitation in a material to monitor its transport properties in the ultrashort femtosecond and nanoscale regime. This is the first demonstration of hard X-ray transient grating spectroscopy, which opens the way to exciting and novel developments.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-021-00797-9