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Fast isochoric laser heating is a scheme to heat matter with a relativistic intensity (>10^{18}  W/cm^{2}) laser pulse for producing an ultrahigh-energy-density (UHED) state. We have demonstrated an efficient fast isochoric heating of a compressed dense plasma core with a multipicosecond kilojoule-class petawatt laser and an assistance of externally applied kilotesla magnetic fields for guiding fast electrons to the dense plasma. A UHED state of 2.2 PPa is achieved experimentally with 4.6 kJ of total laser energy that is one order of magnitude lower than the energy used in the conventional implosion scheme. A two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulation confirmed that diffusive heating from a laser-plasma interaction zone to the dense plasma plays an essential role to the efficient creation of the UHED state.

We report a method for quantitative phase recovery and simultaneous electron energy loss spectroscopy analysis using ptychographic reconstruction of a data set of "hollow" diffraction patterns. This has the potential for recovering both structural and chemical information at atomic resolution with a new generation of detectors.

Transmission electron microscopy using low-energy electrons would be very useful for atomic resolution imaging of specimens that would be damaged at higher energies. However, the resolution at low voltages is degraded because of geometrical and chromatic aberrations. In the present study, we diminish the effect of these aberrations by using a delta-type corrector and a monochromator. The dominant residual aberration in a delta-type corrector, which is the sixth-order three-lobe aberration, is counterbalanced by other threefold aberrations. Defocus spread caused by chromatic aberration is reduced by using a monochromated beam with an energy spread of 0.05 eV. We obtain images of graphene and demonstrate atomic resolution at an ultralow accelerating voltage of 15 kV.

Spatially resolved electron-energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) is performed at diffuse interfaces between MoS2 and MoSe2 single layers. With a monochromated electron source (20 meV) we successfully probe excitons near the interface by obtaining the low loss spectra at the nanometer scale. The exciton maps clearly show variations even with a 10 nm separation between measurements; consequently, the optical band gap can be measured with nanometer-scale resolution, which is 50 times smaller than the wavelength of the emitted photons. By performing core-loss EELS at the same regions, we observe that variations in the excitonic signature follow the chemical composition. The exciton peaks are observed to be broader at interfaces and heterogeneous regions, possibly due to interface roughness and alloying effects. Moreover, we do not observe shifts of the exciton peak across the interface, possibly because the interface width is not much larger than the exciton Bohr radius.

Transmission electron microscopy is an extremely powerful technique for direct characterization of local structure at the atomic scale. However, the resolution of this technique is fundamentally limited by the partial coherence of the electron beam. In this Letter we demonstrate a method that extends the ultimate resolution of the latest generation of aberration corrected transmission electron microscopes by 41% relative to that achievable using conventional axial imaging. Experimental results verify that a real space resolution of 78 pm has been achieved at 200 kV.