Photoemission electron microscopy (PEEM) has evolved into an indispensable tool for structural and magnetic characterization of surfaces at the nanometer scale. In strong contrast to synchrotron-radiation-based X-ray PEEM as a leading method for element-specific magnetic properties via magnetic circular dichroism (MCD), laboratory ultraviolet (UV) PEEM has seen limited application with much smaller dichroism effects for in-plane magnetization. Here we introduce darkfield PEEM as a novel approach to enhance MCD contrast in threshold photoemission, enabling efficient MCD imaging with significantly enhanced contrast by an order-of-magnitude for Fe(001). This advancement paves the way for MCD imaging on femtosecond timescales using modern lasers. The experimental results will be quantitatively benchmarked against advanced relativistic photoemission calculations.
@article{arxiv.2409.04771,
title = {Enhanced magnetic dichroism in darkfield UV photoemission electron microscopy},
author = {Maximilian Paleschke and David Huber and Friederike Wührl and Cheng-Tien Chiang and Frank O. Schumann and Jürgen Henk and Wolf Widdra},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.04771},
year = {2025}
}