This movie shows the transition of a gold sample from a solid (dotted pattern) to a liquid (ring pattern) after being heated by a laser pulse. It was taken with SLAC’s ultrafast “electron” camera, an instrument for ultrafast electron diffraction (UED), in which a powerful electron beam scatters off the atoms in the sample. This interaction generates the intensity pattern seen in the movie, which captures the first 40 trillionths of a second after the laser flash.
Mianzhen Mo/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
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