A new microscope will map the spin of electrons inside materials, revealing hidden magnetic and quantum properties that current instruments cannot see. Today’s best electron microscopes can image atomic structure but remain blind to electron spin—the quantum property that underpins magnetism, data storage, and emerging quantum technologies. This project builds a spin-resolved photoemission microscope, the only one in the UK, by combining advanced lasers, detectors, and spin-polarimetry techniques. It will produce high-resolution images showing not just where electrons are, but how their spins are arranged. If successful, the instrument will let researchers watch spin behaviour inside prototype devices while they operate—for example, tracking how spin currents flow in a spintronic memory cell or how magnetic order changes in a solar cell under light. This could accelerate the design of more efficient data storage, quantum sensors, and energy-harvesting materials. The work is primarily fundamental science: it aims to understand how spin-dependent electronic states arise in complex materials. But past fundamental advances in photoemission spectroscopy have directly enabled today’s semiconductor and battery industries. This instrument could do the same for spin-based technologies.
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Understanding the electronic properties of advanced materials is key to enabling and improving a myriad of practical applications. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy is one of the most powerful probes of their low-energy electronic excitations, which ultimately govern the physical properties of solids. As such, it provides key fundamental insights on the novel states and phases found in complex material systems, as well as on their potential for technology. Combining the latest developments in detector technology, laser light sources, and electron scattering for spin polarimetry, we will create a unique and powerful system that not only enables high-resolution and microscopic-focus angle-resolved spectroscopy from a range of challenging materials systems and environments, but also provides the only UK capability for spin-resolved electronic structure imaging. This promises transformative advances in our understanding of the electronic structure of materials, and in particular their spin-dependent properties, laying the framework for applications ranging from solar cells to spintronic and quantum technologies. It will advance a new form of microscopy, where detailed spectral properties provide a unique contrast mechanism for imaging, and will open new routes to study prototype devices in operando, complementing capabilities of key national facilities. It will leverage existing expertise and facilities within the Centre for Designer Quantum Materials in St Andrews, providing critical feedback to enable the targeted design of quantum, spintronic, magnetic, and electronic materials and devices, and will support a wide user base from across the UK, underpinning a broad array of research areas ranging from catalysis to two-dimensional and topological materials.
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