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Published on: August 22, 2017
Femtosecond X-ray absorption spectroscopy at a hard X-ray free electron laser: application to spin crossover dynamics
Henrik T Lemke1, Christian Bressler, Lin X Chen
1LCLS, SLAC National Laboratory, Menlo Park, California 94025, United States.
Abstract:
X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs) deliver short (<100 fs) and intense (∼10(12) photons) pulses of hard X-rays, making them excellent sources for time-resolved studies. Here we show that, despite the inherent instabilities of current (SASE based) XFELs, they can be used for measuring high-quality X-ray absorption data and we report femtosecond time-resolved X-ray absorption near-edge spectroscopy (XANES) measurements of a spin-crossover system, iron(II) tris(2,2'-bipyridine) in water. The data indicate that the low-spin to high-spin transition can be modeled by single-exponential kinetics convoluted with the overall time resolution. The resulting time constant is ∼160 fs.
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