Spin holography II

TL;DR

This paper reveals that spin-orbit correlations cause spin-dependent features in photoelectron intensity holograms, enabling extraction of spin information from unpolarized electron emission for surface magnetism research.

Contribution

It demonstrates that spin-orbit correlations induce spin-dependent holographic signals in intensity patterns, even with unpolarized electrons, offering a new method to study surface magnetism.

Findings

Spin-orbit correlations cause spin-dependent contributions in holograms.

Spin information can be extracted from intensity holograms using symmetry.

The spin-dependent signal is about 5% in typical cases.

Abstract

The interference of the directly emitted photoelectron wave and the wave scattered coherently by neighboring atoms gives holographic fringes in the photoelectron emission intensity $I(\hat{\bf R})$. In the electron emission holography technique in surface physics, $I(\hat{\bf R})$ is inverted holographically to give a 3D-image of the environment of the source atom. Earlier, we pointed out that the polarization pattern ${\bf P}(\hat{\bf R})$ similarly can be viewed as a hologram of the spin environment of the source atom by virtue of the exchange scattering of the photoelectron by the neighboring atoms. In this paper, we point out that spin-orbit correlations in the photoelectron initial state are responsible for holographic spin-dependent contributions to the intensity hologram $I(\hat{\bf R})$, even if the directly emitted photoelectrons are unpolarized. This remarkable result implies that the emission intensity contains spin information just as the polarization pattern ${\bf P}(\hat{\bf R})$. Although the spin dependent signal in the hologram is rather small ($\sim 5 \% $ in most cases of interest), we show how spin information can be extracted from the intensity hologram, making use of the point symmetry of the environment of the source atom. This way of analyzing photoelectron intensity holograms to extract short-range spin information opens up a new avenue for surface magnetism studies.