Publications Repository - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf

Experiments creating extreme states of matter almost invariably create non-equilibrium states.
These are very interesting in their own right but need to be understood even if the ultimate goal
is to probe high pressure or high temperature equilibrium properties like the equation of state.
Here, we report on the capabilities of the newly developed imaginary time correlation function
(ITCF) technique [1] to detect and quantify non-equilibrium in pump-probe experiments fielding
time resolved x-ray scattering diagnostics. We find a high sensitivity of the ITCF even to a small
fraction of non-equilibrium electrons in the Wigner distribution. The behavior of the ITCF technique is such that modern lasers and detectors should be able to trace the non-equilibrium relaxation from tens of femto-seconds to several 10s of picoseconds without the need for a model.