The high brilliance of the new third-generation synchrotron radiation sources has opened the door to the imaging of surfaces, interfaces and thin films with lateral spatial resolutions of the order of 20 nm. A photoelectron microscope (X-PEEM) combines the chemical and magnetic selectivity of x-ray absorption, the sensitivity to superficial layers of the photoemission technique, and high-resolution imaging. This means that we can obtain a real chemical, compositional, and magnetic mapping of surfaces and interfaces on a nanometric scale. The French X-PEEM microscope installed at Elettra has been operational since late 2005 and is available to users via the Elettra scientific programme committee. On average, approximately fifty scientific projects and programmes are submitted to the beamline each year. After evaluation, about fifteen are selected and carried out. Special attention has been paid to French laboratories in order to foster the emergence of a French community of users and experts. Therefore 50% of the total time available on the beamline is exclusively dedicated to French teams. The remaining time is open to other European users. There are currently about 20 French teams that use the X-PEEM facility at Elettra on a regular basis.

In early 2010, the CNRS-SOLEIL-ELETTRA agreement will come to an end, and the instrument will be returned to SOLEIL, where it will be installed on the soft x-ray microscopy beamline, due to open to users in 2011. In addition to the installation of an instrument at ELETTRA, the agreement created links between the Italian and French x-ray microscopy communities (X-PEEM, STXM, SPEM, etc.) and was an effective way to strengthen collaborations and common scientific programmes.

Contact :
ELETTRA : M. Kiskinova (Head of the Microscopy Group) and A. Locatelli (Head of the Nanospectroscopy Beamline).
SOLEIL : R. Belkhou (Head of the Soft X-ray Microscopy Beamline).

Figure 1: High-resolution X-PEEM image of Spin Ice frustrated magnetic lattices. From the collection of LPM, Nancy.	Figure 2: Néel cap in nanometric Fe/W(110) lattices. From the collection of The Néel Institute, Grenoble.
Figure 3: Exchange coupling in Fe/NiO/Fe(100) tri-layers	Figure 4: Self-assembled dots of Ge/Sl(111) From the collection of University of Montreal, Canada.
Figure 5: The SOLEIL logo formed from lithographed Co magnetic domains.	Figure 6: Magnetic domains of thin layers of iron exchange-coupled to self-assembled MnAs layers. From the collection of AIST, Tsukuba, Japan, and ASU, Tempe, USA.
Figure 7: FeNi/Al2O3/Co magnetic tunnel junction. The two antiferromagnetic layers, consisting of an alloy of NiFe and Co, are represented in green and purple respectively. The leakage magnetic field, traced in red, tends to align the magnetism of each layer in an antiparallel configuration and create a 360 wall.