Observation of the Ferroelectric Material with Instantaneous X-ray Laser Speckles.

Picosecond x-ray speckles experiment has been conducted with a simple setup. The source was a compact silver-plasma-based x-ray laser, with a wavelength of 13.9 nm and pulse duration of 7 ps. The sample was a single crystal of BaTiO3, with ferroelectric multi-domain structure (a/c domains). The matter correlation function, including statistical information of those randomly distributed scatterers (domains here) within the sample, was extracted by deconvolution of the speckle pattern. The instantaneous x-ray speckle technique has proved to be particularly efficient to be used to observe fast microscopic-scale phenomena that are hard to access with other methods currently. © 2004 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]