Development of spin-polarized transmission electron microscope

Abstract

In order to study spin related phenomena in nano-size materials, spin-polarized electron source (PES) has been employed for the incident beam in transmission electron microscope (TEM). The PES has been designed and constructed with optimizing for spin-polarized TEM. The illuminating system of TEM is also designed to focus the spin-polarized electron beam emitted from a semiconductor photocathode with a negative electron affinity (NEA) surface. The beam energy is set to below 40 keV which is lower energy type as a TEM, because the spin interaction with condensed matters is very small corresponding with a Coulomb interaction. The polarized electron gun has realized in an extra high vacuum (XHV) condition and high field gradient of 4 MV/m on a surface of photocathode. Furthermore, it demonstrated that 40-keV polarized electron beam was operated with a sub-milli second pulse mode by using the backside excitation type photocathode. This high performance PES will make it possible to observe dynamically a magnetic field images with high contrast and highspeed temporal imaging in TEM.