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Spin holography II

The interference of the directly emitted photoelectron wave and the wave scattered coherently by neighboring atoms gives holographic fringes in the photoelectron emission intensity $I(\hat{\bf R})$. In the electron emission holography technique in surface physics, $I(\hat{\bf R})$ is inverted holographically to give a 3D-image of the environment of the source atom. Earlier, we pointed out that the polarization pattern ${\bf P}(\hat{\bf R})$ similarly can be viewed as a hologram of the spin environment of the source atom by virtue of the exchange scattering of the photoelectron by the neighboring atoms. In this paper, we point out that spin-orbit correlations in the photoelectron initial state are responsible for holographic spin-dependent contributions to the intensity hologram $I(\hat{\bf R})$, even if the directly emitted photoelectrons are unpolarized. This remarkable result implies that the emission intensity contains spin information just as the polarization pattern ${\bf P}(\hat{\bf R})$. Although the spin dependent signal in the hologram is rather small ($\sim 5 \% $ in most cases of interest), we show how spin information can be extracted from the intensity hologram, making