The HED Instrument at European XFEL: Unique Capabilities to Study Material Properties of Laser-Compressed Matter

The HED instrument at the European XFEL offers unique capabilities to study extreme states of matter, delivering X-ray bursts with up to 2 mJ of pulse energy, fs pulse duration and photon energies up to 25 keV. This allows in-situ studies of highly transient states using various x-ray diagnostics such as diffraction, scattering and imaging [1].

Amongst other drivers, HED provides a 400 TW/25 fs short pulse laser RELAX [2] and a 100J/ns laser DIPOLE-100X, both capable running at 10 Hz enabling high repetition rate experiments for experiments requiring signal integration due to low scattering cross sections.

We will present the status of the instrument with a particular focus on the commissioning and first user experiments with the DIPOLE-100X laser.

References

[1] U. Zastrau et al., J. Synchrotron Radiat. 28 (5), 1393–1416 (2021), doi:10.1107/S1600577521007335

[2] A. Laso Garcia et al., High Power Laser Sci. Eng. 9, E59 (2021), doi:10.1017/hpl.2021.47