Calculated magnetic X-ray circular dichroism of half-metal CrO 2

In a non-polar geometry for non-cubic ferromagnetic materials, it is shown that the X-ray absorption dichroism spectrum is composed of a non-magnetic contribution (natural dichroism) emanating from the reduced crystal symmetry and a magnetic contribution from spin-orbit coupling and spin polarization. Their computation at the L2, 3 edges of the half-metal CrO2 chromium site, illustrate the good agreement with experiment. This is found only when both dichroic contributions are taken into account. Moreover, X-ray magnetic dichroism sum rules can be applied directly to extract the spin and orbital magnetic moments only after removing the natural dichroism from the full spectrum.