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Antiferromagnetic real-space configuration probed by dichroism in scattered x-ray beams with orbital angular momentum

Margaret R. McCarter1, Ahmad I. U. Saleheen1, Arnab Singh2, Ryan Tumbleson1,3, Justin S. Woods4,5, Anton S. Tremsin6, Andreas Scholl1, Lance E. De Long4, J. Todd Hastings7 et al.

Sophie A. Morley1 and Sujoy Roy1,*

  • 1Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
  • 2Materials Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
  • 3Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA
  • 4Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40506, USA
  • 5Materials Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, Illinois 60439, USA
  • 6Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
  • 7Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40506, USA

  • *sroy@lbl.gov
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Phys. Rev. B 107, L060407 – Published 15 February, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.107.L060407

Abstract

X-ray beams with orbital angular momentum (OAM) are a promising tool for x-ray characterization techniques. Beams with OAM have a helicity—an azimuthally varying phase—which leads to a gradient of the light field. New material properties can be probed by utilizing the helicity of an OAM beam. Here, we demonstrate a dichroic effect in resonant diffraction from an artificial antiferromagnet with a topological defect. We found that the scattered OAM beam has circular dichroism at the antiferromagnetic Bragg peak whose sign is coupled to its helicity, which reveals the real-space configuration of the antiferromagnetic ground state. Thermal cycling of the artificial antiferromagnet can change the ground state, as indicated by reversal of the sign of circular dichroism. This result is one of the first demonstrations of a soft x-ray spectroscopy characterization technique utilizing the OAM of x rays. This helicity-dependent circular dichroism exemplifies the potential to utilize OAM beams to probe matter in a way that is inaccessible using currently available x-ray techniques.

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Phys. Rev. B 107, L060407– Published 15 February, 2023
  • Received 13 May 2022
  • Revised 7 September 2022
  • Accepted 11 January 2023
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