News & Scientific Highlights

octahedra rotation

Short x-ray pulses reveal the source of light-induced ferroelectricity

Ultrafast measurements of the fluctuating atomic positions in the quantum paraelectric SrTiO3 after mid-infrared light excitation, reveal details about the creation of the material’s ferroelectric state.

Gas Attenuators

A compact gas attenuator for the SwissFEL ATHOS beamline realized using additive manufacturing

Gas attenuators are important devices providing accurate variation of photon intensity for soft X-ray beamlines. In the SwissFEL ATHOS beamline front-end the space is very limited and an innovative approach has been taken to provide attenuation of three orders of magnitude up to an energy of 1200 eV. Additive manufacturing of a differential pumping system vacuum manifold allowed a triple pumping stage to be realized in a space of less than half a meter. Measurements have shown that the response of the device is as expected from theoretical calculations.

Hercules 20223

The Hercules School visits PSI

20 international students visited PSI as part of the renowned Hercules School to learn about our state-of-the-art techniques and methodologies at our large scale facilities.

ultrafast diffraction scheme

Strong modulation of carrier effective mass in WTe2 via coherent lattice manipulation

Schematic ultrafast surface diffraction setup used for monitoring the crystal lattice in multiple directions.

Hercules School 2022 group photo

Hercules School 2022

PSI hosted again the Hercules School in March 2022. We had the pleasure to welcome 20 international PhD students, PostDocs and scientists to demonstrate our state-of-the-art techniques and methodologies at our large scale facilities, the Swiss Light Source (SLS), the Swiss Spallation Neutron Source (SINQ) and our free electron laser SwissFEL.

COVID call

Priority access call for work on combating COVID-19 continues

On January 30th, 2020, the WHO declared the recent outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a public health emergency of international concern. It declared that there is an urgent need to improve our understanding of the newly identified virus and its possible future evolution as well as to contain the spread; to develop precise diagnostics and treatment, and to improve the public health response and patient care.

The COVID priority access call continues and is still open in 2022.

Supercooled liquid water Xray structure factor

Anomalous temperature dependence of the experimental x-ray structure factor of supercooled water

Supercooled water scattering signals show an anolmalous structure factor temperature dependence suggesting decreasing density at lowering temperatures below 236 K (-37°C).

dual-photocathode laser capabilities and perspectives for exotic FEL modes

Overview of SwissFEL dual-photocathode laser capabilities and perspectives for exotic FEL modes

SwissFEL is a compact, high-brilliance, soft and hard X-ray Free Electron Laser (FEL) facility laser composed of two parallel beam lines seeded by a common linear accelerator (LINAC), and a two-bunch photo-injector. For the injector, an innovative dual-photocathode laser scheme has been developed based on state-of-the-art Ytterbium femtosecond laser systems. We just published an overview of the the SwissFEL Photo Cathode Drive Lasers (PCDL) performance, pulse shaping capabilities as well as the versatility of the systems, which allow many different modes of operation of SwissFEL [1]. The full control over the SwissFEL electron bunch properties via the unique architecture of the PCDL will enable in the future the advent of more advanced FEL modes; these modes are, but not restricted to, the generation of single or trains of sub-fs FEL pulses, multi-color FEL and finally the generation of fully coherent X-ray pulses via laser-based seeding.

eunige

Ultrafast electron localization

This experiment performed at SwissFEL shows how fast we can localize electrons out of an electron gas into correlated, well localized states of a material. It is based on a combined ultrafast x-ray absorption and diffraction experiment on an intermetallic system.