Nuclear resonant x-ray diffraction in grazing incidence geometry is used to determine the lateral magnetic configuration in a one-dimensional lattice of ferromagnetic nanostripes. During magnetic reversal, strong nuclear superstructure diffraction peaks appear in addition to the electronic ones due to an antiferromagnetic order in the nanostripe lattice. We show that the analysis of the angular distribution of the resonantly diffracted x-rays together with the time-dependence of the coherently diffracted nuclear signal reveals surface spin structures with very high sensitivity. This novel scattering technique provides a unique access to laterally correlated spin configurations in magnetically ordered nanostructures and, in perspective, also to their dynamics.
@article{arxiv.1703.08584,
title = {Nuclear resonant surface diffraction},
author = {Kai Schlage and Liudmila Dzemiantsova and Lars Bocklage and Hans-Christian Wille and Matthias Pues and Guido Meier and Ralf Röhlsberger},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.08584},
year = {2017}
}