Soft x-rays induce femtosecond solid-to-solid phase transition

Abstract

Soft x-rays were applied to induce graphitization of diamond through a non-thermal solid-to-solid phase transition. This process was observed within poly-crystalline diamond with a time-resolved experiment using ultrashort soft x-ray pulses of duration 52.5 fs and cross correlated by an optical pulse of duration 32.8 fs. This scheme enabled for the first time the measurement of a phase transition on a timescale of ~150 fs. Excellent agreement between experiment and theoretical predictions was found, using a dedicated code that followed the non-equilibrium evolution of the irradiated diamond including all transient electronic and structural changes. These observations confirm that soft x-rays can induce a non-thermal ultrafast solid-to-solid phase transition on a hundred femtosecond timescale.

arXiv comment27 pages, 17 figures (includes supplementary materials)

References in corpus (4)

• Chemical vapour deposition synthetic diamond: materials, technology and applications
• Thermal and nonthermal melting of silicon under femtosecond x-ray irradiation
• Atomistic-continuum modeling of short laser pulse melting of Si targets
• Phases of random antiferromagnetic spin-1 chains

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