Magnetite is the material used to track the history of the Earth magnetic field. Thus its magnetism, and especially its changes with temperature, have attracted a long-standing interest. Magnetite undergoes several phase transitions, some purely magnetic, like the spin-reorientation transition (typically at 130-140K) where the magnetization changes direction, and others, like the Verwey transition, a metal-insulator transition due to a change in the crystal structure, from cubic to monoclinic. We have recently employed novel microscopy techniques to observe the changes of magnetic domains due to these transitions: one, spin-polarized low-energy electron microscopy (SPLEEM), of which there are four instruments in the world, in collaboration with Andreas K. Schmid and coworkers from the Berkeley National Laboratory, and the other, spin-resolved photoemission electron microscopy (spin-PEEM), of which there is currently only one instrument, at the Max Planck Insitute for Microstructure Physics (Halle), in collaboration with Christian Tusche. Upper left-hand figure: SPLEEM image of the magnetic domains below the Verwey temperature, color-coded for the orientation of the magnetization as shown in the circle below (1). Right-hand figure: spin-PEEM image (2) of the magnetization above (upper image) and below (lower image) the Verwey temperature. These techniques allowed us to obtain images with nm resolution of the magnetic domains below and above the transition temperature.

(1) Laura Martín-García, Arantzazu Mascaraque, Beatriz M. Pabón, Roland Bliem, Gareth S. Parkinson, Gong Chen (陈宫), Andreas K. Schmid, and Juan de la Figuera, "Spin reorientation transition on magnetite (001)", Phys. Rev. B 93 (2016) 134419, DOI:10.1103/PhysRevB.93.134419

(2) J. de la Figuera and C. Tusche, "The Verwey transition observed by spin-resolved photoemission electron microscopy", App. Surf. Sci. (2016), DOI:10.1016/j.apsusc.2016.05.140