Polarized neutron grazing incidence diffraction on magnetic epitaxial thin films

Abstract In order to study the in-plane crystallographic structure of magnetic thin films, we have developed a neutron grazing incidence diffraction (GID) set-up that has been mounted on the EROS reflectometer at the LLB. This set-up allows us to observe the diffraction peaks in the plane of epitaxial thin films. As an example, we present polarized GID measurements on an epitaxial ferromagnetic thin film of the perovskite oxide La 0.7 Sr 0.3 MnO 3 (0 0 1) deposited on SrTiO 3 (0 0 1) (of a surface 1 cm 2 ). This is the first report on polarized GID measurements on a very thin magnetic film (20 nm).