Orbital moment determination of simple transition metal oxides using magnetic X-ray diffraction Original Research Article

Non-resonant magnetic X-ray scattering (NRXMS) is a unique tool allowing the separation of the spin and orbital moment density contributions to the total magnetization density. This method has been successfully applied to the simple transition metal oxides: MnO, CoO and CuO. It is common habit to consider the orbital moment of these oxides to be quenched by the cubic crystal electric field. We do, however, observe non-vanishing orbital moments in the case of CoO and CuO. The partial re-establishment of the orbital moment is related to spin-orbit coupling.