Quantitative magneto optical Kerr effect from diffracted beams

What is it about?

Diffracted-magneto optic Kerr effect can examine the collective magnetic properties of arrays of nanostructures (formation of metastable states during the field induced reversal). So it could provide with quantitative information only with the support of numerical simulations and the comparison with magnetic microscopy measurements . We demonstrate here an implementation of the technique that allows recovering the field dependent spatial distribution of magnetization directly from measurements.

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Why is it important?

The magneto-optic Kerr effect (MOKE) is widely used in studying technologically relevant magnetic materials. Recently MOKE has been extended to diffraction geometry (D-MOKE), to exploit the interference of light for arrays of nano-structures. D-MOKE has been used to study the spatial correlation of magnetization at the nano-scale. We developed an experimental approach to fully recover collective and spatially resolved magnetic information in the light diffracted by arrays of nanostructures.