3D reconstruction of magnetization from dichroic soft X-ray transmission tomography

J Synchrotron Radiat. 2018 Jul 1;25(Pt 4):1144-1152. doi: 10.1107/S1600577518005829. Epub 2018 May 30.

Abstract

The development of magnetic nanostructures for applications in spintronics requires methods capable of visualizing their magnetization. Soft X-ray magnetic imaging combined with circular magnetic dichroism allows nanostructures up to 100-300 nm in thickness to be probed with resolutions of 20-40 nm. Here a new iterative tomographic reconstruction method to extract the three-dimensional magnetization configuration from tomographic projections is presented. The vector field is reconstructed by using a modified algebraic reconstruction approach based on solving a set of linear equations in an iterative manner. The application of this method is illustrated with two examples (magnetic nano-disc and micro-square heterostructure) along with comparison of error in reconstructions, and convergence of the algorithm.

Keywords: X-ray transmission tomography; magnetization configuration reconstruction; soft X-ray transmission microscopy; vector field tomography.