Development of a user-friendly time resolved scanning transmission x-ray microscope at the Advanced Light Source

Time resolved x-ray microscopy at a synchrotron allows researchers to investigate variation of the electronic structure of a material during chemical, structural or magnetic changes with picosecond time resolution. In this presentation we will presetn the status of such a microscope at the Adbvanced Light Source in Berkeley, CA (USA) and how this can be realized using a field programming gate array in combination with a fast point detector. A synchrotron is a pulsed x-ray source with pulse lengths between 50-100 ps. Using low jitter electronics and lock-in detection schemes we are able to suppress noise and drift that is common in a synchrotron environment so that we are able to detect small signals of the order of 10^{-5} whihc helps to distinguish events within a single x-ray pulse and reduces the temporal sensitivity to ~10ps. We will show results based on an existing setup, e.g. movies of spin waves in confined magnetic structures with a periodicity of a few ns, but also describe how this method can be extended to dynamical processes with longer observation times using state of the art FPGA technology. Time resolved measurements with high spatial resolution will be an important part of research at future x-ray sources like e.g. ALS-U