Study of the domain structure transformation at field-induced first-order transition in Ho single crystal

Field-induced first-order magnetic phase transitions are a significant class of magnetic phenomena that, despite decades of research, still present many unresolved aspects. One of the key unanswered questions is the morphology of field-induced phases (magnetic domain structure) in rare earth bulk materials. This proposal aims to study the transformation of the magnetic domain structure in Holmium single-crystal under magnetic fields up to 8 T and in the temperature range from 130 K to 5 K. Remarkably, such an experiment can be performed almost exclusively using hard X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) methods. To our knowledge, there is a complete lack of information in the literature regarding the evolution of the domain structure in heavy rare earth metals, in particular in Holmium, and thus our proposal will show a new path to further research of this class of phenomena.