Measurement of Intrinsic Magnetostriction in Fe–Ga Alloys

The recent development of differential X-ray absorption spectroscopy (DiffXAS) has presented a unique opportunity to bridge the gap that presently exists between macroscopic experimental measurements of magnetostriction, and theoretical models that naturally describe behaviour at an atomic level. Such measurements are capable of explicitly probing the strain between individual pairs of atoms, and thus can be said to measure a sample´s intrinsic magnetostriction. This paper will elaborate on the technical aspects of recent DiffXAS measurements from the important Fe₈₁Ga₁₉ alloy; providing a full description of the DiffXAS technique, its features and requirements, and study the process of extracting atomic-scale strain information from the resulting spectra.