Warm dense crystallography

The intense femtosecond-scale pulses from x-ray free electron lasers (XFELs) are able to create and interrogate interesting states of matter characterized by long-lived nonequilibrium semicore or core electron occupancies or by the heating of dense phases via the relaxation cascade initiated by the photoelectric effect. We address here the latter case of ``warm dense matter'' (WDM) and investigate the observable consequences of x-ray heating of the electronic degrees of freedom in crystalline systems. We report temperature-dependent density functional theory calculations for the x-ray diffraction from crystalline LiF, graphite, diamond, and Be. We find testable, strong signatures of condensed-phase effects that emphasize the importance of wide-angle scattering to study nonequilibrium states. These results also suggest that the reorganization of the valence electron density at eV-scale temperatures presents a confounding factor to achieving atomic resolution in macromolecular serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) studies at XFELs, as performed under the ``diffract before destroy'' paradigm.