Emergence of anomalous dynamics in soft matter probed at the European XFEL.

Journal:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Published:
DOI:
10.1073/pnas.2003337117
Affiliations:
8
Authors:
19
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Research Highlight

Watching water heat up at ultrahigh time scales

© Kim Steele/Getty

Under extreme conditions and short time scales, water can remain a liquid at temperatures exceeding 170 degrees Celsius.

At very short time scales, matter can act very differently from how it behaves in everyday life. Powerful X-ray lasers are promising for probing the short-time-scale dynamics of matter, but this has been difficult to date because the energy of their pulses can fluctuate.

Now, by realizing an unprecedented beam stability, a team that included researchers at the University of Hamburg in Germany has used the most powerful X-ray laser in the world to explore how water behaves when heated rapidly on time scales of a millionth of a second.

This understanding of how superheated water behaves will be valuable for predicting how water-containing heat-sensitive samples will act under similar conditions.

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References

  1. PNAS USA 117, 24110–24116 (2020). doi: 10.1073/pnas.2003337117
Institutions Authors Share
European X-ray Free-Electron Laser Facility GmbH (XFEL), Germany
7.833333
 0.41
German Electron Synchrotron (DESY), Germany
6.833333
 0.36
Cluster of Excellence - Hamburg Center for Ultrafast Imaging (CUI), UHH, Germany
2.666667
 0.14
La Trobe University, Australia
0.666667
 0.04
University of Hamburg (UHH), Germany
0.500000
 0.03
Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL), Germany
0.500000
 0.03