Phonon Photography

At the atomic level, materials are always vibrating; this determines how they conduct heat, how they conduct electricity, and many more of their most important properties. But these vibrations – called phonons, as they are quantized – are too fast, too small and too subtle to see directly using conventional microscopes. This project therefore proposes to develop the so-called Dark-Field X-ray Microscopy Technique for use at X-ray Free Electron Lasers. When built, such an X-ray laser based microscope setup will have a time resolution a trillion times better than other X-ray microscopes, allowing us to see phonons buried deep inside materials in real-time. With such a technique, we will be able to directly see how phonons move and observe how they interact to give materials some of their most fundamental properties.