Abstract
Integral to the exploration of nonequilibrium phenomena in solid state systems is the measurement of lattice motion after photoexcitation by a femtosecond laser pulse. For the past two decades, ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) has played a critical role in the field of photoinduced structural dynamics, including the study of non-adiabatic phase transitions, metastable states, and the electron–phonon interaction in correlated systems. This chapter introduces the fundamentals of the UED technique—one of the principal tools employed in this dissertation—accompanied by an overview of recent advances in instrumentation that significantly improve the temporal and momentum resolutions. The design, construction, and characterization of a table-top keV UED setup are discussed in detail. The quality of UED data in the transmission geometry critically depends on fabrication of single-crystalline thin films with a large lateral dimension, and three state-of-the-art fabrication techniques are presented. The chapter is concluded by the data analysis protocol used throughout the dissertation.
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