Abstract
Beam splitters and delay lines are among the key building blocks of modern-day optical laser technologies. Progress in x-ray free electron laser source development and applications over the past decade is calling for their counter part operating in the Angstrom wavelength regime. Recent efforts in x-ray optics development have demonstrated relatively stable delay lines that most often adopted the division of wavefront approach for the beam splitting and recombination configuration. However, the two recombined beams have yet to achieve sufficient mutual coherence to enable applications such as interferometry, correlation spectroscopy, and nonlinear spectroscopy. We present the first experimental realization of the generation of highly mutually coherent pulse pairs using an amplitude-split delay line design based on transmission grating beam splitters and channel-cut crystal optic delay lines. The performance of the prototype system was analyzed in the context of x-ray coherent scattering and correlation spectroscopy, where we obtained nearly identical high-contrast speckle patterns from both branches. We show in addition the high level of dynamical stability during continuous delay scans, a capability essential for high sensitivity ultra-fast measurements.
Highlights
Modern optical laser technology relies heavily on high performance optical components that enable precise manipulation of the electromagnetic field at subwavelength spatial/temporal scales
We have yet to establish effective beam splitters and delay lines, which are required for multibeam x-ray laser beam
According to Eq (1), to achieve phase stability at 9.83 keV, the positioning jitter of the air-bearing stage needs to be much smaller than 0.22 nm and is far smaller than the actual 20 nm positional jitter of the air-bearing linear stage
Summary
Modern optical laser technology relies heavily on high performance optical components that enable precise manipulation of the electromagnetic field at subwavelength spatial/temporal scales. It has the potential to directly probe the femtosecond and picosecond time scale (fs-ps) dynamics of disordered matters and their phase transitions that are currently inaccessible by any other existing experimental probes, e.g., many-body dynamics in supercooled liquids, dynamical heterogeneity, and strong-tofragile transitions [10,11] Strong interest in those multi-x-ray pulse capabilities have driven tremendous efforts in the design and implementation of hard-x-ray split-delay optics at several x-ray FEL facilities over the past decade [12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]. We show in addition the capability of maintaining this high mutual coherence during continuous delay scans, which is unprecedented and essential for high sensitivity ultrafast measurements
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