Effect of high-intensity x-ray radiation on Bragg diffraction in silicon and diamond

Abstract

We simulated the Bragg reflection of high-intensity short x-ray pulses from single-crystal silicon and diamond by coupling tight-binding-molecular dynamics with a simple atomic kinetics model. We found that even when the pulse-averaged Bragg intensity degrades significantly, the reflectivity drops only slightly at the beginning of the pulse until the lattice is disordered by non-thermal melting. These results suggest that Bragg reflectors could produce shortened x-ray pulses through temporal slicing.