Toward ultrafast time-resolved Debye-Scherrer x-ray diffraction using a laser-plasma source.

An elliptical glass capillary has been used to focus ultrashort Cu K alpha x-ray pulses emitted from a femtosecond laser-produced plasma. Due to its high magnification (7x), the optic transforms the divergent x-ray emission of the plasma into a quasicollimated x-ray beam with a divergence of only 0.18 degrees. As an application we demonstrate the possibility to perform Debye-Scherrer diffraction experiments with the simultaneous detection of several diffraction orders. This will allow one to extend time-resolved x-ray diffraction with femtosecond laser-plasma x-ray sources to a much wider range of materials, which are not easily available as single crystals.