Exploiting The Coherence of Synchrotron X-Rays to Study The Dynamics of Quantum Matter

A challenging aspect of designing functional materials is to understand the impact of a wide range of characteristic spatial and temporal scales on stabilizing novel quantum phases. Commonly used mean field approaches often provide reasonable estimates for static properties at macroscopic length scales, however, it does not provide the requisite fundamental insight into the important processes governing deviations from these averages. Such fluctuations are critically important. Soft x-rays are a powerful element-specific probe to study such mesoscopic charge and spin textures. The coherence available at current and newly upgraded light sources will enhance our tools to give significantly more detailed information of otherwise difficult to probe quantum states. We select the coherent part of the x-ray beam to produce an interference pattern known as speckle. Here I will discuss how we use that speckle to look inside, and better understand, the transitions of orbital order, amorphous noncollinear magnets and metal-to-insulator materials.