Towards a 3-D magnetometry by neutron reflectometry

Polarised Neutron reflectometry with spin analysis allows one to probe the in-depth magnetic profiles of thin films down to about 100 nm. Analysis of specular reflections gives access to the in-plane vectorial absolute magnetic moment. Off-specular reflectometry gives information about lateral contrasts with typical lengths ranging from 5 μm to 100 μm. Furthermore, surface diffraction at grazing angle gives access to transverse dimensions between 10 nm and 300 nm with a resolution in that direction of several nm. The combination of these 3 techniques applied to thin magnetic objects like thin films, arrays of lines or arrays of dots, leads to 3-D patterns in the reciprocal space. The method is extremely sensitive while giving the average on a rather large surface. Such a technique is therefore not applicable for the study of a single magnetic dot, but it generates unique results in several cases including patterns of domain walls in thin films with perpendicular anisotropy, arrays of magnetic dots, patterned fines in magnetic thin films. (authors)