FEMTO Group

Welcome, you have reached the home page of the former FEMTO team at SLS. The group as part of the SLS user facility implemented the laser/electron-beam 'slicing' technique to generate energy tunable femtosecond x-rays at the MicroXAS beamline [1,2]. In the pre-FEL era this source of highly stable, short x-ray pulses made it possible to perform time-resolved hard x-ray absorption and diffraction experiments with time resolution of 100 - 200 fs. The FEMTO group successfully operated this unique femtosecond hard x-ray source over a decade from 2006 to 2017.

In the past years the FEMTO team was in parallel in charge of the design and installation of the SwissFEL Bernina Instrument, an instrument dedicated to the research on condensed matter [3]. With SiwssFEL coming online the group is now responsible of operating this instrument and the group name has accordingly changed. The reserch focus of the Bernina group builds on the experience of FEMTO continuing on the physics of nonequilibrium structural (and electronic ordering) dynamics in solid-state materials. Of particular interest are the so-called strongly correlated electron systems, where novel material properties arise from subtle interactions among different degrees of freedom.

For an extensive overview of the FEMTO scientific output we kindly refer you to our publication repository DORA.

  1. Sub-picosecond tunable hard x-ray undulator source for laser/x-ray pump-probe experiments , G. Ingold, P. Beaud, S. Johnson, A. Streun, R. Abela, A. AlAdwan, D. Abramsohn, M. Boege, D. Grolimund, A. Keller, L. Rivkin, T. Schilcher, T. Schmidt, V. Schlott, L. Schulz, F. Van der Veen, and D. Zimoch, AIP Conf. Proc. 879 (AIP, New York, 2007) 1198–2002.
  2. Spatiotemporal stability of femtosecond hard x-ray undulator radiation studied by control of coherent optical phonons , P. Beaud, S. L. Johnson, A. Streun, R. Abela, D. Abramsohn, D. Grolimund, F. Krasniqi, T. Schmidt, V. Schlott, and G. Ingold, Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 174801 (2007).
  3. SwissFEL instrument ESB femtosecond pump-probe diffraction and scattering , G. Ingold, J. Rittmann, P. Beaud, M. Divall, C. Erny, U. Flechsig, R. Follath, C. P. Hauri, S. Hunziker, P. Juranic, A. Mozzanica, B. Pedrini, L. Sala, L. Patthey, B. D. Patterson, and R. Abela, AIP Conf. Proc. 1741, 030039 (2016).