Berlin 2012 – scientific programme

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MA: Fachverband Magnetismus

MA 38: MagneticThin Films I

MA 38.12: Talk

Thursday, March 29, 2012, 12:30–12:45, H 0112

Magneto-optical coupling in ferromagnetic thin films investigated by VMOGE — •Kahming Mok¹, Camelia Scarlat¹, György J. Kovacs¹, Lin Li², Vitaly Zviagin¹, Jeffrey McCord³, Manfred Helm¹, and Heidemarie Schmidt¹ — ¹Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Germany — ²State Key Laboratory of Nuclear Physics and Technology, Peking University, China — ³Institute of Materials Science, University of Kiel, Germany

We investigated the magneto-optical coupling in ferromagnetic thin films (Fe, Ni₂₀Fe₈₀, Co, Ni₈₀Fe₂₀, Ni) in the spectral range from 300 to 1100 nm. We performed Mueller matrix ellipsometry measurements in a magnetic field of arbitrary orientation and magnitude up to 400 mT at room temperature with a set-up vector-magneto-optical generalized ellipsometer (VMOGE). We extracted the magneto-optical dielectric tensor ε^MO of the ferromagnetic thin films under saturated in-plane magnetization conditions. The off-diagonal elements of the ε^MO depend on the net spin polarization and the electronic band structure of the magnetized material. For ferromagnetic Fe, Co, and Ni, the converted ε^MO agrees well with reported experimental optical conductivity data. With additional measurements on the magnetization of the ferromagnetic thin films, we extracted the magnetic field independent magneto-optical coupling constant Q, which is a useful parameter for characterization of magneto-optical materials.

Reference: K. Mok et al., Phys. Rev. B 84, 094413 (2011)