New paper in Physical Review Letters highlighted in Physics Magazine

Postdoc Justin Woods and former postdoc Xiaoqian Chen's work, "Switchable X-Ray Orbital Angular Momentum from an Artificial Spin Ice," just appeared in Physical Review Letters.  The paper was also highlighted in Physics Magazine in a Viewpoint article entitled "Switching the Twist in X Rays with Magnets."   The research was conducted by a collabortive team from U.K.'s Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics departments along with Lawrence Berkeley, Argonne, and Brookhaven National Laboratories.  So called “twisted” X-ray beams carry orbital angular momentum (OAM) and hold great promise for imaging and probing materials at the nanoscale.  In this work, we showed that a patterned array of nanoscale magnets, an artificial spin ice (ASI), can impart OAM to X-ray beams and that the beams can be switched on and off with temperature and magnetic field.  The research opens the possibility of using ASIs as reconfigurable X-ray optics, and switchable X-ray OAM beams could provide new tools for studying magnetic materials.