Experimental setups for FEL-based four-wave mixing experiments at FERMI

The recent advent of free-electron laser (FEL) sources is driving the scientific community to extend table-top laser research to shorter wavelengths adding elemental selectivity and chemical state specificity. Both a compact setup (mini-TIMER) and a separate instrument (EIS-TIMER) dedicated to four-wave-mixing (FWM) experiments has been designed and constructed, to be operated as a branch of the Elastic and Inelastic Scattering beamline: EIS. The FWM experiments that are planned at EIS-TIMER are based on the transient grating approach, where two crossed FEL pulses create a controlled modulation of the sample excitations while a third time-delayed pulse is used to monitor the dynamics of the excited state. This manuscript describes such experimental facilities, showing the preliminary results of the commissioning of the EIS-TIMER beamline, and discusses original experimental strategies being developed to study the dynamics of matter at the fs-nm time-length scales. In the near future such experimental tools will allow more sophisticated FEL-based FWM applications, that also include the use of multiple and multi-color FEL pulses. © 2016 International Union of Crystallography.