Imprinted spiral structures as neutron polarizers.

Neutron diffraction from magnetic spiral structures is governed by strong selection rules for the polarization of the outgoing beam. When the sample is entirely of one chirality--for instance a right handed spiral--the neutrons diffracted by some Bragg reflections are fully polarized. While the scattering theory has been formulated long ago, attempts to controllably modify the population of left handed and right handed spiral domains in natural magnetic structures (which for instance occur in some rare earth metals) have been largely unsuccessful. In contrast, we have been able to imprint helical magnetic structures in La/Fe multilayers (each layer approximately 30 {angstrom} thick) simply by rotating the growing sample in a weak external field (30e). A first estimate is given of the efficiency of these multilayers as polarizers of neutron beams.