3D Mapping of Magnetic Nanotextures with Nanometer Resolution Using Holographic Vector-Field Electron Tomography

Abstract

The increasing exploration of nanomagnetism into the third dimension lead to the discovery of novel frustration mechanisms and ensuing magnetic configurations and textures, many with unprecedented properties [1]. The fundamental understanding of these configurations and the interactions stabilizing them requires a quantitative microscopy technique revealing 3D magnetic structures with a spatial resolution below characteristic magnetic length scales pertaining to a given problem. In our contribution we introduce holographic vector-field electron tomography (VFET), a combination of off-axis electron holography (EH) and electron tomography in the transmission electron microscope (TEM), facilitating sub-10 nanometer spatial resolution [2, 3]. Off-axis EH utilizes an interferometric setup to determine the phase shift of an electron wave that passed through the sample. The Aharonov-Bohm phase shift of ferro-magnetic samples is proportional to projections of both electric potential (mainly mean inner potential) and magnetic flux density (B-field), which allows to reconstruct them in 3D from a tilt series of 2D phase images by tomographic methods [2]. The principle and workflow of holographic VFET is illustrated in Fig. 1. In addition to the comprehensive workflow of recording and reconstructing the 3D data, crucial steps of alignment and image processing, e.g., precise displacement correction of 2D projections and 3D tomograms, phase unwrapping, denoising, etc. are addressed.Fig. 2 shows two examples, how holographic VFET is applied to reveal 3D magnetic configurations in nanoscale magnetic materials. In Figs. 2a,b, we present 3D remanent states in a Co-rich CoNi cylindrical nanowire (NW) with a diameter of 70 nm and the hcp c-axis oriented almost perpendicular to the NW axis [4]. We observed two different remanent states after the application of an external saturation field of 2 T perpendicular (Fig. 2a) and parallel (Fig. 2b) to the NW axis. The external field direction perpendicular to both the wire axis and the magnetocrystalline easy axis resulted in a transverse-vortex chain configuration, whereas a field direction parallel to the wire axis produced longitudinal vortex domains with their cores aligned along the applied field, but with alternately opposite chirality. Micromagnetic simulations confirm our findings and enable us to understand the origin of the observed complex magnetic states, in particular, reveal a large influence of the NW morphology on the remanent state. In Fig. 2c, the first 3D reconstruction of Bloch-Skyrmions in a FeGe needle-shaped FIB sample taken at 90K temperature is depicted. The reconstructed textures provide insights into a variety of previously unseen local deviations from a homogeneous Bloch character within the skyrmion tubes (SkTs), details of the collapse of the skyrmion texture at surfaces, and a correlated modulation of the SkT in FeGe along their tube axes. [5] **