Ultrafast pulses from X-ray lasers reveal how atoms move at timescales of a femtosecond. That’s a quadrillionth of a second. However, measuring the properties of the pulses themselves is challenging. While determining a pulse’s maximum strength, or ‘amplitude,’ is straightforward, the time at which the pulse reaches the maximum, or ‘phase,’ is often hidden. A new study trains neural networks to analyze the pulse to reveal these hidden sub-components. Physicists also call these sub-components ‘real’ and ‘imaginary.’ Starting from low-resolution measurements, the neural networks reveal finer details with each pulse, and they can analyze pulses millions of times faster than previous methods.
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