Scientific Highlights

Magnetic beauty within

Magnetic vortices come full circle

The first experimental observation of three-dimensional magnetic ‘vortex rings’ provides fundamental insight into intricate nanoscale structures inside bulk magnets, and offers fresh perspectives for magnetic devices.

Nanoparticle-Based Magnetoelectric BaTiO3–CoFe2O4 Thin Film Heterostructures for Voltage Control of Magnetism

Multiferroic composite materials combining ferroelectric and ferromagnetic order at room temperature have great potential for emerging applications such as four-state memories, magnetoelectric sensors, and microwave devices.

(a) The dichroic ptychography setup. A diamond phase plate converts linearly polarized light into CL or CR light, which is then focused close to the sample plane. A piezoelectric stage is used to scan the sample across the beam. (b) The absorption part of reconstructed images taken with CL and CR polarized light at the Gd L3 edge with a photon energy of 7.2445 keV, which contain both electron density and magnetic contributions. The difference of these images removes the electron density contrast of Pt refe…

High-resolution hard x-ray magnetic imaging with dichroic ptychography

Imaging the magnetic structure of a material is essential to understanding the influence of the physical and chemical microstructure on its magnetic properties. Magnetic imaging techniques, however, have been unable to probe three-dimensional micrometer-size systems with nanoscale resolution. Here we present the imaging of the magnetic domain configuration of a micrometer-thick FeGd multilayer with hard x-ray dichroic ptychography at energies spanning both the Gd L3 edge and the Fe K edge, providing a high spatial resolution spectroscopic analysis of the complex x-ray magnetic circular dichroism.