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Henighan, Thomas

Publications and source records attributed to Henighan, Thomas.

Frequency-selective excitation of high-wavevector phonons

We demonstrate here the selective excitation of a narrow frequency band of TA phonons throughout the Brillouin zone of germanium using a sinusoidally modulated picosecond laser pulse. The pulse is produced through the combination of two chirped and delayed pulses using a stabilized interferometer. The phonon excitations are probed by time- and momentum- resolved x-ray diffuse scattering.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Direct Measurement of Anharmonic Decay Channels of a Coherent Phonon

In this paper, we report channel-resolved measurements of the anharmonic coupling of the coherent ${A}_{1g}$ phonon in photoexcited bismuth to pairs of high wave vector acoustic phonons. The decay of a coherent phonon can be understood as a parametric resonance process whereby the atomic displacement periodically modulates the frequency of a broad continuum of modes. This coupling drives temporal oscillations in the phonon mean-square displacements at the ${A}_{1g}$ frequency that are observed across the Brillouin zone by femtosecond x-ray diffuse scattering. Finally, we extract anharmonic coupling constants between the ${A}_{1g}$ and several representative decay channels that are within an order of magnitude of density functional perturbation theory calculations.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗