Complete measurement of the surface second-harmonic magneto-optical Kerr effect for permalloy films

摘要

We have measured all of the amplitudes and relative phases of the effective surface second harmonic magneto-optic susceptibility tensor elements in the soft ferromagnet, permalloy (Ni_(80)Fe_(20)). Results show the full symmetry expected for a spatially isotropic, but magnetically anisotropic, system and demonstrate a general mirror symmetry that reduces the number of independent tensor element families to only seven. The measurements demonstrate a near equality in the size of several magnetic and nonmagnetic tensor elements. This equality helps explain the large second-harmonic Kerr effects found in essentially all optical geometries and provides a challenge to current theoretical treatments.