| Summary: | Electron correlation describes the interaction between electrons in a multi-electron system. It plays an important role in determining the speed of relaxation of atoms and molecules excited by XUV/X-ray pulses, such as the argon decay rate. Most research on electron correlation has centered on the role of correlation in stationary states. A time-resolved experimental study of electron correlation is a grand challenge due to the required temporal resolution and photon energy. In this research, we investigated Auger decay in argon using 200-attosecond X-ray pulses reaching the carbon K-edge. At such a high photon energy, ionization occurs not only from the outer most levels (<i>3s</i> and <i>3p</i>), but also from the <i>2p</i> core shells. We have measured a lifetime of 4.9 fs of L-shell vacancies of argon in pump–probe experiments with a home-built high-resolution time-of-flight spectrometer.
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