NANOSCALE MAGNETISM STUDIED WITH SOFT X-RAY SPECTROMICROSCOPY

摘要

Magnetism has long fascinated mankind since the first lodestone was discovered, and was found to provide directional information. Today our society exploits magnetism in many different ways: – electric motors and transformers, magnetic data storage, and magnetic resonance medical imaging, to name just a few. Increasingly, the properties of magnetic materials at fine spatial scales (below 50 nm) and very short time scales (down to the femtosecond regime) are critical to tech- nological advances [1], such as the recent commercial availability of small size terabyte hard disks. Techniques to study static and dynamic magnetism under a variety of condi-tions at the nanoscale are needed to develop better understanding of the funda-mental physics of magnet-ism [21 and to assist further technological develop-ment. This article describes the capabilities of the soft X-ray spectromicroscopy beamline [31 at the Canadian Light Source (CLS-SM) for studying nano-magnetism, and illustrates them with some recent results.