Following the dynamics of matter with femtosecond precision using the X-ray streaking method.

X-ray Free Electron Lasers (FELs) can produce extremely intense and very short pulses, down to below 10 femtoseconds (fs). Among the key applications are ultrafast time-resolved studies of dynamics of matter by observing responses to fast excitation pulses in a pump-probe manner. Detectors with sufficient time resolution for observing these processes are not available. Therefore, such experiments typically measure a sample's full dynamics by repeating multiple pump-probe cycles at different delay times. This conventional method assumes that the sample returns to an identical or very similar state after each cycle. Here we describe a novel approach that can provide a time trace of responses following a single excitation pulse, jitter-free, with fs timing precision. We demonstrate, in an X-ray diffraction experiment, how it can be applied to the investigation of ultrafast irreversible processes.