Search

The article discusses an experiment by physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who have used intense femtosecond laser pulses to turn a thin film of gold into a warm dense state. They have measured a key parameter of the sample: the frequency-dependent dielectric function, which contains information about the density of states and band structure. The results show an initial transient response that settles after about a picosecond into a quasi-steady-state response.