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 […]