Time-Resolved Magneto-Optical Kerr Effect of Magnetic Thin Films for Ultrafast Thermal Characterization
- 9 June 2016
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Chemical Society (ACS) in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters
- Vol. 7 (13), 2328-2332
- https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpclett.6b00945
Abstract
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.Funding Information
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (51206167, 51336009)
- National Science Foundation (1420013)
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