Maximilian Bucher, Ken R. Ferguson, Tais Gorkhover, Sebastian Carron, Franz-Josef Decker, Jacek Krzywinski, Alberto Lutman, Agostino Marinelli, James Turner, Maria Mueller, Daniela Rupp, Camila Bacellar, Adam Chatterley, James Cryan, Michael Ziemkiewicz, Charles Bernando, Luis Gomez, Curtis Jones, Justin Kwok, Rico Mayro P. Tanyag, Thomas Möller, Oliver Gessner, Andrey Vilesov, and Christoph Bostedt

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Nanoparticles irradiated by intense x-ray pulses from LCLS are immediately transformed into a highly excited nanoplasma. Within the first few femtoseconds of the x-ray pulse the particles are ionized and on longer time scales they disintegrate due to Coulomb forces. Currently, it is discussed how the nanoplasma creation and disintegration affects the particle diffraction response. We study nanometer sized Xe-clusters irradiated with the newly available accelerator based x-ray pump and x-ray probe technique with delays up to 800 fsec. The data shows that higher diffraction orders diminish first and vanish completely as the nanoplasma expansion progresses. We discuss the observed changes in the coherent scattering pattern of the nanoparticles based on simulations of the particle electron density.