Understanding the microscopic mechanisms governing fast magnetic switching processes is of high fundamental interest as well as of vital technological importance. A macrospin picture often fails to adequately describe the situation in extended systems. A detailed study of the magnetization dynamics in complex magnetic materials thus requires a real-space mapping of the magnetization distribution in the ground state and of its time evolution. Imaging these transient magnetization distributions on a sub-nanosecond time scale is an experimental challenge, which has been successfully addressed in recent years by time-resolved Kerr and X-ray photoemission microscopies [1].
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