Powder diffraction with spin polarized neutrons

Abstract

The polarized neutron diffraction (PND) and spherical neutron polarimetry (SNP) techniques are very powerful tools and provide arguably the most sensitive methods for determining magnetization distributions at all the positions of the chemical. However, they can only apply to single crystals. Because of the difficulties encountered in growing sufficiently large samples of molecular magnets, and the inability to measure efficiently powder samples and more specifically nanoscale systems, the PND and SNP techniques are inadequate for a number of highly interesting subjects. We present a new technique taking advantage of the recent progress of the polarized 3He neutron spin filters that should overcome these limitations and which we propose to call the ‘flipping difference method’. We describe the measurement strategy, the data analysis technique and preliminary analysis of the results of the first measurements.