Investigation of the non-equilibrium dynamics after an impulsive impact provides insights into couplings among various excitations. A two-temperature model (TTM) is often a starting point to understand the coupled dynamics of electrons and lattice vibrations: the optical pulse primarily raises the electronic temperature Tel while leaving the lattice temperature Tl low; subsequently the hot electrons heat up the lattice until Tel = Tl is reached. This temporal hierarchy owes to the assumption that the electron-electron scattering rate is much larger than the electron-phonon scattering rate. We report herein that the TTM scheme is seriously invalidated in semimetal graphite. Time-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (TrPES) of graphite reveals that fingerprints of coupled optical phonons (COPs) occur from the initial moments where Tel is still not definable. Our study shows that ultrafast-and-efficient phonon generations occur beyond the TTM scheme, presumably associated to the long duration of the non-thermal electrons in graphite.

Two-dimensional electron gases at oxide surfaces or interfaces show exotic ordered states of matter, like superconductivity, magnetism or spin-polarized states, and are a promising platform for alternative oxide-based electronics. Here we directly image a dense population of randomly distributed ferromagnetic domains of ∼40 nm typical sizes at room temperature at the oxygen-deficient surface of SrTiO3, a non-magnetic transparent insulator in the bulk. We use laser-based photoemission electron microscopy, an experimental technique that gives selective spin detection of the surface carriers, even in bulk insulators, with a high spatial resolution of 2.6 nm. We furthermore find that the Curie temperature in this system is as high as 900 K. These findings open perspectives for applications in nano-domain magnetism and spintronics using oxide-based devices, for instance through the nano-engineering of oxygen vacancies at surfaces or interfaces of transition-metal oxides.

Photoelectron emission microscopy has been carried out to study the magnetic properties of iron meteorite associated with the Widmanstätten structure for the first time. A magnetic circular dichroic image reveals a unique magnetic domain structure, resulting in the “head-on” magnetic coupling over the interface between the α and γ lamellae. Such a magnetic domain structure is unfavorable in any synthetic Fe–Ni alloys. Micromagnetics simulation reasonably explains that the formation of magnetic domains is induced by the L10-type FeNi (tetrataenite) phase segregated at the boundary in the Widmanstätten structure.

We report the first experiments carried out on a new chemical and magnetic imaging system, which combines the high spatial resolution of a photoemission electron microscope (PEEM) with a continuous-wave deep-ultraviolet laser. Threshold photoemission is sensitive to the chemical and magnetic structures of the surface of materials. The spatial resolution of PEEM is limited by space charging when using pulsed photon sources as well as aberrations in the electron optics. We show that the use of a continuous-wave laser enabled us to overcome such a limit by suppressing the space-charge effect, allowing us to obtain a resolution of approximately 2.6 nm. With this system, we demonstrated the imaging of surface reconstruction domains on Si(001) by linear dichroism with normal incidence of the laser beam. We also succeeded in magnetic imaging of thin films with the use of magnetic circular dichroism near the Fermi level. The unique features of the ultraviolet laser will give us fast switching of the incident angles and polarizations of the photon source, which will be useful for the characterization of antiferromagnetic materials as well as ferromagnetic materials.

We demonstrate the vortex-chirality control in mesoscopic disk magnets using photoelectron emission microscopy (PEEM). Micrometer-sized vortex-chirality-control devices of permalloy were designed and fabricated by electron-beam lithography and lift-off. The magnetic images were obtained by PEEM using the x-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) with circularly polarized synchrotron radiation. The XMCD-PEEM observation reveals that the vortex chirality in the designed devices was perfectly controlled by an external applied magnetic field.