Science Highlights

Diamond Light Source’s advanced X-ray imaging techniques have helped uncover new evidence of how ancient organisms navigated using Earth’s magnetic field. An international team of researchers used soft X-ray magnetic tomography on the I08-1 beamline to capture the first 3D magnetic images of giant magnetofossils - iron structures formed by an unknown organism over 90 million years ago. 

Harrison, R. J., Neethirajan, J., Pei, Z., Xue, P., Marcano, L., Abrudan, R., Ringe, E., Tung, P.-Y., Kuppili, V. S. C., Kaulich, B., Daurer, B. J., Colocho Hurtarte, L. C., Kazemian, M., Chang, L., Donnelly, C., and Valencia, S.
Magnetic vector tomography reveals giant magnetofossils are optimised for magnetointensity reception, Nature, 2025.

These findings have been featured in a dedicated Diamond news article.

Understanding magnets’ nanoscale structures is critical to developing magnetic materials for applications in clean energy, sensing, computing devices, and many other technologies. While x-ray and electron microscopy can create high-resolution images of magnetic thin films, imaging thicker samples is often impossible. Jeffrey Neethirajan of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Germany and his colleagues now overcome this limitation with an x-ray imaging technique for micrometer-thick magnets.

Using the I08-1 instrument at the Diamond Light Source, the UK’s national synchrotron facility, the researchers scanned a circularly polarized x-ray beam across a magnetic sample and then repeated the process with the polarization reversed. Circularly polarized x-rays interact differently with magnetic structures depending on their polarization direction—an effect called x-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD). By comparing diffraction patterns obtained using each polarization direction, magnetic structures inside a sample can be mapped.

Jeffrey Neethirajan, Benedikt J. Daurer, Marisel Di Pietro Martínez, Aleš Hrabec, Luke Turnbull, Rikako Yamamoto, Marina Raboni Ferreira, Aleš Štefančič, Daniel Alexander Mayoh et al., Soft X-Ray Phase Nanomicroscopy of Micrometer-Thick Magnets, Phys. Rev. X 14, 031028 (2024)