Abstract
A fundamental understanding of magnetic and spin-dependent phenomena requires the determination of spin structures and spin excitations down to the atomic scale. The direct visualization of atomic-scale spin structures [1 – 4] has first been accomplished for magnetic metals by combining the atomic resolution capability of Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy (STM) [5, 6] with spin sensitivity, based on vacuum tunnelling of spin-polarized electrons [7]. The resulting technique, Spin-Polarized Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy (SP-STM), nowadays provides unprecedented insight into collinear and non-collinear spin structures at surfaces of magnetic nanostructures and has already led to the discovery of new types of magnetic order at the nanoscale (fig. 1 and [8]). More recently, the detection of spin-dependent exchange and correlation forces has allowed a first direct real-space observation of spin structures at surfaces of antiferromagnetic insulators [9]. This new type of scanning probe microscopy, called Magnetic Exchange Force Microscopy (MExFM), provides a powerful new tool to investigate different types of spin-spin interactions based on direct-, super-, or RKKY-type exchange down to the atomic level.
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