Nanowerk February 28, 2023
Orbital angular momentum (OAM) is an important property of the electronic structure in materials that leads to magnetism. A team of researchers in the US (University of Kentucky, Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, UC Berkeley) has developed and demonstrated a new technique that uses a special patterned array of engineered nanoscale magnets to impart OAM to X-ray beams. They examined an artificial spin crystal or spin “ice”, consisting of arrays of nanomagnets, and how it interacts with X-rays. OAM beams could be turned on and off by modest variations of temperature and applied magnetic fields. These results imply reconfigurable X-ray optics can be designed using ASIs, and these structures may enable selective probing of electronic and magnetic states in materials… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Schematic of x-ray OAM from a topological defect in an artificial spin ice… Credit: Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 117201, 15 March 2021Â