Toward Ultrafast Time-Resolved Debye-Scherrer X-Ray Diffraction Using A Laser-Plasma Source

An elliptical glass capillary has been used to focus ultrashort Cu K alpha x-ray pulses emitted from a femtosecond laser-produced plasma. Due to its high magnification (7X), the optic transforms the divergent x-ray emission of the plasma into a quasicollimated x-ray beam with a divergence of only 0.18 degrees. As an application we demonstrate the possibility to perform Debye-Scherrer diffraction experiments with the simultaneous detection of several diffraction orders. This will allow one to extend time-resolved x-ray diffraction with femtosecond laser-plasma x-ray sources to a much wider range of materials,which are not easily available as single crystals. (C) 2009 American Institute Of Physics. [DOI: 10.1063/1.3196180]