Abstract
Optical and magneto-optical properties of amorphous Gd22Fe78 (GdFe) thin films prepared by direct current (DC) sputtering on thermally oxidized substrates were characterized by the combination of spectroscopic ellipsometry and magneto-optical spectroscopy in the photon energy range from 1.5 to 5.5 eV. Thin SiNx and Ru coatings were used to prevent the GdFe surface oxidation and contamination. Using advanced theoretical models spectral dependence of the complete permittivity tensor and spectral dependence of the absorption coefficient were deduced from experimental data. No significant changes in the optical properties upon different coatings were observed, indicating reliability of used analysis.
Highlights
Considerable attention has been paid to magnetic and magneto-optical (MO) properties of amorphous ferrimagnetic thin films composed of rare-earth and transition metals because of their useful technological applications [1,2,3,4]
To obtain the GdFe dielectric permittivity tensor we analyzed optical and magneto-optical properties of two samples with structural compositions and nominal thicknesses listed in the Table 1
For the off-diagonal elements calculations we used the diagonal elements of the GdFe dielectric imaginary parts of off‐diagonal elements, ε2r2r and ε2i2i were calculated from the magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE) spectra in the permittivity tensor and thicknesses determined by the spectroscopic ellipsometry
Summary
Considerable attention has been paid to magnetic and magneto-optical (MO) properties of amorphous ferrimagnetic thin films composed of rare-earth and transition metals because of their useful technological applications [1,2,3,4]. As one of the important magneto-optical storage materials, GdFe has significant advantages, such as large magnetization density, and possibility to adjust its compensation temperature, coercive and saturation magnetization by changing the composition [5,6,7]. Because of these properties, GdFe has a substantial impact on modern micro- and nanoelectronic research, where it is often used in domain wall junctions or MO memories [1,3,4]. Magneto-optical properties were examined by polar magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE) rotation and ellipticity measurements From these data we determined the spectral dependence of the real, ε2r , and imaginary, ε2i , part of off-diagonal GdFe permittivity tensor elements
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