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Ultrafast spectroscopy

A glimpse of spin motion

Nature Materials volume 15, pages 593–594 (2016)Cite this article

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Ultrashort pulses of X-rays from a free-electron laser capture the spatiotemporal evolution of spins in the different crystallographic directions of a complex magnetic material.

Diffraction and spectroscopy are the most common methods in condensed-matter physics research, but they provide information in the reciprocal space. Going back to real space and real time, where our own senses and intuition function, is a challenge that we are currently addressing through different microscopy and time-resolved methods. Whereas atomic and femtosecond resolutions have been available for a long time, their combination is not straightforward. In addition, the physics of materials is ruled by the position of atoms and the distribution of charges and spins around them, and these three observables have very different cross-sections and interaction mechanisms when studied with probes such as photons of different wavelengths, electrons, positrons, muons or neutrons. Studying magnetism — originating from the concerted alignment and motion of spins — using real-space and real-time techniques currently poses one of the toughest experimental challenges. Neutrons can induce and probe spin excitations in solids, delivering a small amount of energy (fractions of nW per cm2) to the system. Furthermore, they do not interact with charges as they are electrically neutral. However, they have a very low flux and are very difficult to pulse at the ultrafast timescale. Alternatively, resonant inelastic X-ray scattering (RIXS) offers sensitivity to magnetic moments, enabling the creation and probing of spin excitations in solids. Dean and co-workers1 report the first implementation of femtosecond-resolved RIXS experiments, enabled by the novel X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) technology, and use it to disentangle the dynamical evolution of the spin–spin correlations in the different crystallographic directions of the anisotropic magnet Sr2IrO4.

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Figure 1: Structure of Sr2IrO4 and schematics of the measuring process.

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  1. Fabrizio Carbone is at the Laboratory for Ultrafast Microscopy and Electron Scattering (LUMES), Faculté de Science de base, Lausanne Center for Ultrafast Science (LACUS), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland,

    Fabrizio Carbone

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  1. Fabrizio Carbone
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Correspondence to Fabrizio Carbone.

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Carbone, F. A glimpse of spin motion. Nature Mater 15, 593–594 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4647

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