Time-Resolved Magneto-Optical Kerr Effect of Magnetic Thin Films for Ultrafast Thermal Characterization

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• 作者：Jun-Yang Chen ; Jie Zhu ; Delin Zhang ; Dustin M. Lattery ; Mo Li ; Jian-Ping Wang ; Xiaojia Wang
• 刊名：The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：July 7, 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：7
• 期：13
• 页码：2328-2332
• 全文大小：370K
• 年卷期：0
• ISSN：1948-7185

文摘

Thermomagnetic and magneto-optical effects are two fundamental but unique phenomena existing in magnetic materials. In this work, we demonstrate ultrafast time-resolved magneto-optical Kerr effect (TR-MOKE) as an advanced thermal characterization technique by studying the original factors of the MOKE signal from four magnetic transducers, including TbFe, GdFeCo, Co/Pd, and CoFe/Pt. A figure of merit is proposed to evaluate the performance of the transducer layers, corresponding to the degree of the signal-to-noise ratio in TR-MOKE measurements. We observe improved figure of merit for rare-earth transition-metal-based TbFe and GdFeCo transducers and attribute this improvement to their relatively larger temperature-dependent magnetization and the Kerr rotation angle at the saturated magnetization state. Furthermore, an optimal thickness of TbFe is found to be ∼18.5 nm to give the best performance. Our findings will facilitate the nanoscale thermal characterization and the device design where the thermo-magneto-optical coupling plays an important role.