Development of a new technique for XMCD determining magnetic anisotropy on polycrystalline materials.

In this proposal, we suggest to use the newly developed experimental setup on the ID12 beamline, and to develop a new measurement technique, in which firstly orientation of a single grain with respect to the external field will be determined using X-ray diffraction, and then X-ray beam will be focused on this single grain and element selective magnetization curve will be measured with XMCD. Since the proposed method is new, we would like to first test its accuracy. We will use Nd2Fe14B and SmFe11Ti polycrystalline samples with different grain sizes to compare XMCD-obtained anisotropy with known anisotropy constants detected on single crystals of these compounds. We believe that our experiment will be successful, and after validation, the new technique for determination the anisotropy field and leading magnetocrystalline anisotropy constants on polycrystalline samples will become available to other ID12 users.