We investigated the magnetic excitations and lattice vibrations in a spinel-type vanadium oxide MnV₂O₄ by using inelastic neutron and x-ray scattering. We discovered magnetic excitations which were not reproduced by the linear spin-wave calculation. We also confirmed that the excitation modes were not explained by the simple lattice vibration, since the dispersion and the scattering intensity are different from those obtained from inelastic neutron scattering experiment. Therefore, we proposed that the observed excitation was related to the orbital excitation mode coupling with the spin-wave excitation via spin-orbital exchange interaction and the relativistic spin-orbit interaction.

We report enantiopure crystal growth and chiral helimagnetic ordering in a chiral inorganic compound CsCuCl₃ with a chiral space group of right-handed P6₁22 or left-handed P6₅22. Our two-step crystal growth technique makes it possible to grow centimeter sized enantiopure single crystals. First, millimeter-sized seed crystals were synthesized by spontaneous crystallization with stirring. Then, centimeter-sized homo-chiral crystals were obtained from the selected enantiopure seed crystals. Polarized neutron diffraction experiments probed that the right-handed crystal forms purely right-handed helimagnetic structure, and the left-handed crystal forms purely left-handed helimagnetic structure. Therefore, crystallographic chirality of CsCuCl₃ strongly combined with helimagnetic chirality via Dzyalloshinskii-Moriya interaction.

In this study, we evaluated the effect of molecular weight on the formation of a shish–kebab morphology on a wide spatial scale. Here we examined blended polyethylene with 97 wt% deuterated polyethylene and 3 wt% protonated polyethylene comprising molecules with a range of molecular weights. Measurements were conducted with various X-ray and neutron scattering techniques. The nanometer-scale analysis revealed that the crystal lattice is also independent of the molecular weight. Moreover, small-angle X-ray and neutron scattering measurements did not reveal any influence of molecular weight.

A twisted magnetic structure in a Ni film attached to an antiferromagnetic FeMn layer is suggested by a complimentary use of the polarized neutron reflectivity (PNR) and the depth-resolved X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) techniques. The depth-resolved XMCD shows that the perpendicular magnetization component in the Ni film decreases around the interface to FeMn, while the PNR data indicates that an in-plane magnetization component is induced in Ni around the interface to FeMn by weak in-plane magnetic fields. These results are reasonably interpreted by assuming that the magnetic moment in the Ni layer is twisted from the perpendicular to the in-plane directions towards the interface to FeMn.

In this article, we introduce recent studies of reduction annealing effects on physical properties in T’-structured cuprate oxide using quantum beam spectroscopy. Our Cu K-edge x-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) study on the electronic states of T’-structured Pr_2-xCe_xCuO_4+α-δ clearly shows increase of number of electron at the copper sites due to annealing, similar to the case of Ce substitution. The qualitative analyses, furthermore, suggest the emergence of holes as well as electrons in the heavily Ce-doped Pr_2-xCe_xCuO_4+α-δ due to annealing. The role of annealing procedure, which is necessary for the appearance of superconductivity in T’-structured cuprates, is discussed in connection with recent photoemission spectroscopy and muon spin relaxation/rotation studies.

The laser driven neutron source has features of short pulses, small source size, and features an extremely high peak flux compared with existing accelerator driven neutron source. On the other hand, the high-power laser technology is still immature, the average output of the pulsed laser is smaller than the beam power of the accelerator, and the average neutron generation rate is three orders of magnitude lower than the accelerator driven. In this paper, we will outline the neutron generation technology by laser while assuming searching for utilization method making full use of the characteristics of laser neutron source.

Neutron sources have a long history and production methods have changed depending on progress of nuclear technologies such as accelerator and nuclear reactor. History of neutron sources and present status is explained. Near-future plans are overviewed. Furthermore, discussions on requirement for the future science is introduced.

Analytic framework to quantitatively evaluate the performance of existing neutron scattering instruments would be valuable to find out new possibilities and potentials of slow neutron beams. A conceptual introduction of ongoing exploration for building up a framework is discussed.