David is the Principal Beamline Scientist at the I17 beamline at Diamond Light Source. This is a new beamline that is currently under construction and will provide imaging capabilities for 2D and 3D measurements for quantum, magnetic and functional materials. David was previously a senior measurement scientist at Oxford Instruments and held several post-doctoral research associate positions at Diamond and at Imperial College London. Before this he completed his undergraduate and PhD studies at Durham University.

His research interests are based around quantum and magnetic materials. These materials have quantum effects which take place at the atomic scale resulting in interesting properties in the materials which appear in the macroscale. These systems show interesting behaviour with external factors such as electric or magnetic fields, electrical currents, temperature and strain. David has a keen interest in understanding the dynamic behaviour of these systems, how they respond to excitation in both the time and frequency domain. Furthermore, David has a keen interest in the development of scientific instrument, exploring and developing new techniques to probe materials to the next level.

X-ray techniques for magnetic studies

In this talk I will explain a variety of techniques where x-rays can be used to investigate the behaviour in magnetic systems. This will primarily focus on x-rays generated from synchrotron radiation sources where we can tune the energy and polarisation of x-rays so that they are sensitive to the magnetisation from specific elements within your samples. This is a particularly power tool for investigating independent behaviour in layered materials which is hidden from lab based techniques . We will discuss how the sensitivity to magnetisation can be combined with reflectivity or scattering techniques to look for periodic behaviour in magnetic structure, again providing a powerful tool to look inside multilayered structures. We can also combine the sensitivity to magnetisation with a variety of real space imaging techniques, I’ll describe a few of these techniques including STXM, Ptychography, PEEM and Holography measurements. By collecting a series of 2D images at different projections I’ll highlight some new developments in 3D magnetic imaging. I will also cover how we make use of the pulsed nature of synchrotron radiation with pump-probe techniques to explore magnetisation dynamics. My current role involves the development of a new soft x-ray beamline which will primarily make use of ptychography imaging. We will use a laminography technique to reveal 3D magnetic structures with pump-probe dynamics techniques.