Transient x-ray diffraction to measure the dynamic response of shocked lithium fluoride single crystal

Transient x-ray diffraction, also called time-resolved x-ray diffraction and dynamic x-ray diffraction, is one novel diagnostic technique for probing shocked solids. It can provide direct information about microscopic mechanisms governing shock-induced deformation and structural changes at atomistic scales with nanosecond and picoseconds resolution, and lately, it has become possible to measure the structure of transients with sub-picoseconds and sub–Angstrom resolution with the development of ultrafast lasers which can produce femtosecond electron and x-ray pulses in the form of characteristics emission lines as well as x-ray continua in the keV range. In this paper, we detect and measure directly the dynamic response of lithium fluoride single crystal shocked compressed by laser irradiation in SHENGUANG II. In our experiments, high-intensity lasers irradiated a thin Cu foil to generate helium-like rays as x-ray source. Film (IP--image plate) recorded x rays diffracted from multiple lattice planes both perpendicular and oblique angles to the shock loading direction [100]. We gained the diffraction signals of the lattice planes (200) shocked and unshocked, what’s more, other lattices (113), (1-13). The positions of the diffraction lines associated with the (200) lattice plane indicated compression of the lattice along [100] direction by 13%. In the experiment, a large-angle detector consists of two films-one rectangular in shape,one triangular in shape that are positioned to record x rays diffracted from a shocked single crystal nearly within a full π steradian. The experiment shows that transient x-ray diffraction can diagnose the dynamical response of solid with higher resolution.