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.
- Only at BESSY II worldwide: IR nanoscopy at very long THz wavelengthsThe team at the IRIS beamline at BESSY II has created a new experimental option: They achieved infrared nanoscopy with a spatial resolution of around 50 nm at very long THz wavelengths. This was possible thanks to a temporal pattern of light pulses known as the low-alpha operating mode at BESSY II. Worldwide, BESSY II is the only synchrotron light source at which users could perform nanoscopy in a single setup from 25 to 4000 cm-1, a unique opportunity for ultra-broadband characterisation of complex materials at the nanoscale in both the life sciences and materials sciences.
- Ultrafast demagnetisation - Thinner iron, stronger effectThe thinner an iron film, the more easily it can be demagnetised by a laser pulse. Researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen, working with Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and other partners, have discovered why: the key lies in the magnetic order at the material's interfaces. In the long term, these findings could contribute to the development of new technologies for magnetic data storage. The results have been published in the scientific journal Advanced Science.
- Patterns of polar vortices in lead-free superlattices on siliconA team at HZB has, for the first time, reported polar vortices in (BaTiO3/SrTiO3)10 superlattices on silicon. These results expand the range of materials and substrates on which polar topological textures can occur and open up new options for incorporating complex ferroelectric states into silicon-based technologies.