Combination of a reflectometer and a nonmagnetic waveguide for experiments with polarized neutron microbeams

Neutron waveguides are three-layer thin-film structures which transform part of a collimated (with an angular divergence of 0.01°) and relatively wide (0.1 mm) incident neutron beam into a narrow (0.1 μm wide) and divergent (0.1°) beam at the output. This submicron beam (which cannot be obtained using conventional focusing elements) is promising for studying nanostructures. We propose a combination of a polarized-neutron reflectometer and a nonmagnetic (independent of the neutron spin) waveguide for experiments employing polarized neutron beams with a submicron spatial resolution. This scheme can be applied, for example, for position-sensitive studies of magnetic nanostructures.