Inverse faraday effect as mechanism for ultrafast all-optical magnetic switching

Abstract

Manipulation of the magnetization with ultra-short laser pulses is attractive for potential information storage device applications. The term all-optical switching (AOS) refers to the fact that some magnetic materials can be switched solely by the effect of an ultrafast laser pulse, without any applied magnetic field. First, this effect was demonstrated for ferrimagnets [1-3] but later also for layered, synthetic ferrimagnets [4] and recently even for ferromagnets [5]. Two different kinds of AOS have to be distinguished, namely helicity dependent AOS [1,4,5], where the new magnetic orientation is defined by the helicity of the laser light, and thermally driven switching with linearly polarized light [2,3,6] which cannot define the new orientation but always switches the initial state to the reversed one.