Doubling of the orbital magnetic moment in nanoscale Fe clusters

Magnetic circular dichroism has been used to study the orbital and spin moments in supported nanoscale Fe clusters deposited in situ from a gas aggregation source onto highly oriented pyrolitic graphite in ultrahigh vacuum. Mass-filtered (2.4 nm, 610 atoms) and unfiltered (1–5 nm, 40–5000 atoms) clusters at low coverage have an orbital magnetic moment about twice that of bulk Fe. With increasing coverage the orbital moment of the unfiltered clusters converges to the bulk value. There is no detectable change in the spin moment as a function of coverage. Mass-filtered clusters show an increase in the magnetic dipole moment which we ascribe to distortion resulting from their higher impact energy. An increasing magnetic remanence with coverage is found.