Energy loss magnetic chiral dichroism: A new technique for the study of magnetic properties in the electron microscope (invited).

The similarity between x-ray absorption near edge structure and electron energy loss near edge structure is well known. However, “exporting” x-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) to the transmission electron microscope (TEM) was considered impossible with present technology since electron probes possessing chirality (i.e., spin polarization) cannot be set up with sufficient intensity. But recently magnetically induced chiral electronic transitions were detected in the TEM. In analogy to XMCD we introduced the term EMCD (energy loss magnetic chiral dichroism). The mechanism builds upon the formal equivalence between the mixed dynamic form factor for inelastic electron scattering and the absorption cross section for x-rays. Experiments on the 3d ferromagnets show effects very similar to XMCD. Calculations based on the WIEN2K package are in good agreement with experiments. The recent improvement in signal strength and spatial resolution allows now to study atom specific spin and orbital moments on a scale of less than 10 nm, an important progress for spintronics and nanomagnetism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]