University of Washington

The intense femtosecond-scale pulses from x-ray free electron lasers (XFELs) are able to create and interrogate interesting states of matter characterized by long-lived non-equilibrium semicore or core electron occupancies or by the heating of dense phases via the relaxation cascade initiated by the photoelectric effect. We address here the latter case of ‘warm dense matter’ (WDM) and investigate the observable consequences of x-ray heating of the electronic degrees of freedom in crystalline systems. We report temperature-dependent density functional theory calculations for the x-ray diffraction from crystalline LiF, graphite, diamond, and Be. We find testable, strong signatures of condensed-phase effects that emphasize the importance of wide-angle scattering to study nonequilibrium states. These results also suggest that the reorganization of the valence electron density at eV-scale temperatures presents a confounding factor to achieving atomic resolution in macromolecular serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) studies at XFELs, as performed under the “diffract before destroy” paradigm.