Attosecond science offers unique opportunities to investigate electronic and structural dynamics at the heart of important processes in atomic, molecular and solid-state physics. The generation of attosecond bursts of light with photon energies spanning in the soft X-ray region has been achieved on table-top sources by exploiting high-order harmonic generation. X-ray absorption spectroscopy is a well-established element-specific technique able to access information on the electronic and lattice structure of the probed material by interrogating its electronic inner shells. In the last years, the possibility to combine this powerful technique with the sub-fs resolution provided by attosecond pulses has opened the way to the investigation of ultrafast electron dynamics previously inaccessible. In this seminar, a setup to perform femtosecond IR pump – attosecond SXR probe experiments using X-ray absorption spectroscopy will be presented. Two investigations with this technique in graphite and TiS2 will be presented, highlighting the possibility to extract information on both the electronic and structural dynamics.
Attoscience and Ultrafast Optics group at ICFO, Barcelona