Circular dichroic experiments with electrons - recent results of the CHIRALTEM project

The recent progress in instrumentation guarantees that ELNES will rest a strong competitor of XANES in spite of the improved spatial resolution seen with synchrotrons. Up to now there was however one application uniquely reserved for synchrotrons: X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD). Recently it was shown that contrary to intuition XMCD can well be measured with inelastic electron scattering [1]. In analogy to XMCD we introduced the term ELMCD: Energy Loss Magnetic Chiral Dichroism. We choose the adjective chiral instead of circular in order to stress that there is no (circular) polarization of the probe electron involved. Rather, it is the chirality of the allowed transitions that is detected in the inelastic electron scattering experiment.