measurements – Lightsources.org

An international team has detected at HZB’s vector magnet facility VEKMAG an unusual ferromagnetic property in a two-dimensional system, known as “easy-plane anisotropy”. This could foster new energy efficient information technologies based on spintronics for data storage, among other things. The team has published its results in the renowned journal Science.

The thinnest materials in the world are only a single atom thick. These kinds of two-dimensional or 2D materials – such as graphene, well-known as consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms – are causing a great deal of excitement among research teams worldwide. This is because these materials promise unusual properties that cannot be obtained using three-dimensional materials. As a result, 2D materials are opening the door to new applications in fields such as information and display technology, as well as for critical components in extremely sensitive sensors.

Read more on the HZB website

Image: STM topography of a monolayer CrCl₃ grown on Graphene/6H-SiC(0001). Inset, a magnified topography image, which reveals the grain boundaries.

Credit: HZB

Synchrotrons work like a giant microscope, and they both need mirrors and lenses to bend and shape light. The better control we have over the light source, the more we can see. The quality of images that can be captured using a microscope or a synchrotron rely heavily on the optics used.

As technology has advanced over the past few decades and as synchrotron users push the boundaries of what can be achieved, there has been a lot of excitement over the upgrades of synchrotron mirrors and what that can mean for the experiments that can be done.

However, there is a bottleneck for the production of new and improved X-ray optics like mirrors. It turns out that it is hard to develop metrology instruments that can validate and measure the quality of new high-precision mirrors. Producing these instruments and alleviating the bottleneck is the goal of the metrology community, as they say, if you cannot test something, you cannot manufacture it.

Using the properties of speckle to get better measurements

The metrology community has made significant advances by making improvements to existing techniques to test X-ray mirrors. However, a team from Diamond set about creating a brand-new instrument which can potentially improve the toolbox for metrologists and manufacturers around the world.

Read more on the Diamond website

Image: Dr Hongchang Wang (Left) is supervising his PhD student Simone Moriconi (Right) for testing SAM system

Tag: measurements

Spintronics: Exotic ferromagnetic order in two-dimensions

Nano-precision metrology of X-ray mirrors