NEAT starts user operation
Gerrit Günther und Veronka Grzymek help Zhilun Lu with the experiment. © HZB
The newly built time of flight spectrometre NEAT has welcomed its first users: Jie Ma from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and his colleague Zhilun Lu examined magnetic excitations in crystalline samples and enjoyed fast data rate and high flexibility of instrumental configurations. NEAT team is now looking forward to further new studies and user experiments!
The scientists from Shanghai did find what they were looking for, after only 60 minutes of data collection: “Our experiment was very successful and we hope to publish the results soon”, Zhilun Lu said.
Neutron time-of-flight spectrometer NEAT has a long history of successful application to study dynamics and function on very broad time and space domains ranging from 10-14 – 10-10 seconds and from 0.05 to up to about 5 nanometers respectively. Started originally in 1995 as NEAT I, NEAT II has been fully rebuild in order to address the needs of the user community for more powerful instruments. The upgrade started in 2010 after a rigorous internal and external selection process and resulted in 70 fold higher flux and a number of new instrumental capabilities including an improved angular resolution, larger accessible wavelength range and a design suited for high magnetic field experiments up to 15 Tesla.
- Magnon momentum microscopy: A new window into nanoscale spin-wavesAn international team lead by the Max Born Institute has developed a new type of momentum microscopy to image magnons — the quanta of collectively excited spins — directly in two-dimensional reciprocal space using soft X-rays. Measurements have taken place at BESSY II and PETRA III, first author ist the HZB physicist Steffen Wittrock. Owing to its remarkable sensitivity, simplicity, and access to nanometer-scale wavelengths, this novel technique establishes a powerful and versatile platform for exploring nonlinear magnon interactions, which are promising for future computing schemes.
- Spintronics at BESSY II: Real-time analysis of magnetic bilayer systemsSpintronic devices enable data processing with significantly lower energy consumption. They are based on the interaction between ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic layers. Now, a team from Freie Universität Berlin, HZB and Uppsala University has succeeded in tracking, for each layer separately, how the magnetic order changes after a short laser pulse has excited the system. They were also able to identify the main cause of the loss of antiferromagnetic order in the oxide layer: the excitation is transported from the hot electrons in the ferromagnetic metal to the spins in the antiferromagnet.
- Protein crystallography at BESSY II: faster, better and more and more automaticMany diseases are linked to malfunctions of proteins in the organism. The three-dimensional architecture of these molecules is often highly complex, but it can provide valuable insights into biological processes and the development of drugs. X-ray diffraction at the MX beamlines of BESSY II can be used to decipher the 3D structure of proteins. To date, more than 5000 structures have been solved at the three MX beamlines. Here, we present a review and an outlook with Manfred Weiss, head of the research group for macromolecular crystallography.