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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Ultrafast x-ray thermometry: Contrasting strain and Debye-Waller effects in platinum thin films

J.-E. Pudell1,*, M. Mattern2,†, F. Baltrusch3, F. L. Boariu4, M. Kronseder5, R. Shayduk1, A. Madsen1, M. Rössle4, M. Bargheer3,4 et al.

D. Schick2 and A. von Reppert3

  • *Contact author: jan-etienne.pudell@xfel.eu
  • †Contact author: mattern@mbi-berlin.de
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Phys. Rev. B 113, L220301 – Published 12 June, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/x46h-3kdb

Abstract

Thermal energy and temperature govern a wide range of physical properties and dynamics in solids. X-ray diffraction can be used to monitor material-specific temperatures on ultrafast timescales and within nanostructures by exploiting thermal expansion or the Debye-Waller effect. Here, we simultaneously track the intensity and position changes of different out-of-plane Bragg peaks of a 16nm thick Pt film on an MgO substrate upon equilibrium heating and upon femtosecond laser excitation to quantify the mean-square atomic displacement and the lattice expansion. Our comparison of these two x-ray thermometers experimentally verifies that the in-plane expansion of homogeneously excited continuous single-crystalline thin films is forbidden on picosecond timescales. This drastically changes the out-of-plane thermal expansion coefficient, i.e., the relationship between the observed lattice expansion and the corresponding temperature increase. Thus, considering the boundary conditions of in-plane lattice expansion is generally indispensable for extracting temperatures from the lattice expansion in diffraction experiments.

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Phys. Rev. B 113, L220301– Published 12 June, 2026
  • Received 25 January 2026
  • Revised 8 April 2026
  • Accepted 22 April 2026
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