May 18, 1995
We extend our previous study of the polarization dependence of the nonlinear optical response to the case of magnetic surfaces and buried magnetic interfaces. We calculate for the longitudinal and polar configuration the nonlinear magneto-optical Kerr rotation angle. In particular, we show which tensor elements of the susceptibilities are involved in the enhancement of the Kerr rotation in nonlinear optics for different configurations and we demonstrate by a detailed analysis how the direction of the magnetization and thus the easy axis at surfaces and buried interfaces can be determined from the polarization dependence of the nonlinear magneto-optical response, since the nonlinear Kerr rotation is sensitive to the electromagnetic field components instead of merely the intensities. We also prove from the microscopic treatment of spin-orbit coupling that there is an intrinsic phase difference of 90$^{\circ }$ between tensor elements which are even or odd under magnetization reversal in contrast to linear magneto-optics. Finally, we compare our results with several experiments on Co/Cu films and on Co/Au and Fe/Cr multilayers. We conclude that the nonlinear magneto-optical Kerr-effect determines uniquely the magnetic structure and in particular the magnetic easy axis in films and at multilayer interfaces.
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September 4, 1995
Nonlinear magneto-optics is a very sensitive fingerprint of the electronic, magnetic, and atomic structure of surfaces, interfaces, and thin ferromagnetic films. Analyzing theoretically the nonlinear magneto-optical Kerr effect for thin films of Fe(001) and at Fe surfaces we demonstrate exemplarily how various electronic material properties of ferromagnets , such as the $d$-band width, the magnetization, the substrate lattice constant, and the film-thickness dependence can be...
August 3, 1994
We show that the nonlinear optical response reflects sensitively the electronic structure of transition-metal surfaces and interfaces. $d$ and $s$ electrons may contribute rather differently to the second harmonic generation (SHG) signal. This results from the different sensitivity of $d$ and $s$ electrons to surface and symmetry changes. Consequently, SHG for noble metals shows a by far larger dependence on the polarization of the incoming light than for transition metals li...
October 27, 2017
Using density functional theory calculations, we have found an enhanced magneto-optical Kerr effect in Fe/insulator interfaces. The results of our study indicate that interfacial Fe atoms in the Fe films have a low-dimensional nature, which causes the following two effects: (i) The diagonal component $\sigma_{xx}$ of the optical conductivity decreases dramatically because the hopping integral for electrons between Fe atoms is suppressed by the low dimensionality. (ii) The off...
January 17, 2018
We have studied the magneto-optical spectra of ultrathin magnetic films deposited on Si substrates coated with an oxide layer (SiOx). We find that the Kerr rotation angle and the ellipticity of ~1 nm thick CoFeB thin films, almost transparent to visible light, show a strong dependence on the thickness of the SiOx layer. The Kerr signal from the 1 nm CoFeB thin film can be larger than that of ~100 nm thick CoFeB films for a given SiOx thickness and light wavelength. The enhanc...
July 7, 1995
Using a spin-polarized full-potential linear muffin-tin orbital method we present calculations of the nonlinear magneto-optical Kerr effect for thin bcc Fe films within a slab geometry. Film layer dependent contributions to the Kerr spectrum are determined. Thus, we calculate the magneto-optical Kerr spectra for the linear and nonlinear case. Our results show clearly that the Kerr spectra of thin films are characteristicly different from those at surfaces of bulk materials. I...
January 28, 1999
The nonlinear magneto-optical Kerr-effect (NOLIMOKE) is determined for freestanding Fe monolayers with several in-plane structures from first principles. Based on the theory of nonlinear magneto-optics by H\"ubner and Bennemann [Phys. Rev. B, {\bf 40}, 5973 (1989)] we calculate the nonlinear susceptibilities of the monolayers using the ab initio FLAPW-method WIEN95 with the additional implementation of spin-orbit coupling and the calculation of the dipole transition matrix el...
April 22, 2024
We have developed a novel, compact and cost-effective magneto-optical method for quantifying the spin-orbit torque (SOT) effective field vector (hSO) in magnetic thin films subjected to spin current injection. The damping-like (hSODL) component of the vector is obtained by the polar Kerr response arising from the out-of-plane magnetization tilting, whereas the field-like component (hSODL) is obtained by current-induced hysteresis-loop shifting study, using conventional longit...
September 30, 2021
We report the magneto optic Kerr effect (MOKE) angle of Au magnetically excited by spin accumulation. We perform time resolved polar MOKE measurements on Au/Co heterostructures. In our experiment, the ultrafast optical excitation of the Co drives spin accumulation into an adjacent Au layer. The spin accumulation, together with spin-orbit coupling, leads to non-zero terms in the off-diagonal conductivity tensor of Au, which we measure by recording the polarization and elliptic...
September 1, 1997
We calculate the nonlinear magneto-optical response of free-standing fcc (001), (110) and (111) oriented Fe monolayers. The bandstructures are determined from first principles using a full-potential LAPW method with the additional implementation of spin-orbit coupling. The variation of the spin-orbit coupling strength and the nonlinear magneto-optical spectra upon layer orientation are investigated. We find characteristic differences which indicate an enhanced sensitivity of ...
December 10, 2018
Surfaces and interfaces of magnetic nanostructures can reveal rather interesting and unusual properties that differ substantially from those of bulky materials. Here we apply the surface-sensitive method of optical second harmonic generation (SHG) for the studies of magnetization induced effects that appear in the nonlinear reflection from interfaces between ferromagnetic (Co) and heavy metals (Pt, Ta, W, Au, Ag, Cu). We demonstrate the appearance of magnetization induced var...