Applications of soft x-ray magnetic dichroism

Applications of x-ray magnetic circular and linear dichroism (XMCD and XMLD) are reviewed in the soft x-ray region, covering the photon energy range 0.4-2 keV, which includes important absorption edges such as the 3d transition metal L-2,L-3 and rare earth M-4,M-5. These techniques enable a broad range of novel and exciting studies such as on the electronic properties and magnetic ordering of novel nanostructured systems. XMCD has a sensitivity better than 0.01 monolayer (at the surface) and due to simple detection methods, such as electron yield and fluorescence yield, it has become a workhorse technique in physics and materials science. It is the only element-specific technique able to distinguish between the spin and orbital parts of the magnetic moments. The applications are vast, e. g., in x-ray holographic imaging, XMCD gives a spatial resolution of tens of nm. While many studies in the past were centered on physics, more recently new applications have emerged in areas such as chemistry, biology and earth and environmental sciences. For instance, XMCD allows the determination of the cation occupations in spinels and other ternary oxides. In scanning transmission x-ray microscopy (STXM), XMCD enables us to map biogenic magnetite redox changes resulting in a surprising degree of variation on the nanoscale. Another recent development is ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) detected by time-resolved XMCD which opens the door to element-, site- and layer-specific dynamical measurements. By exploiting the time structure of the pulsed synchrotron radiation from the storage ring the relative phase of precession in the individual magnetic layers of a multilayer stack can be determined.