Magneto-optic imaging: Normal and parallel field components of in-plane magnetized samples

Abstract

Magneto-optical (MO) imaging has become a powerful tool for determining magnetic properties of materials by detecting the stray magnetic fields. The technique consists in measuring the Faraday rotation, θF, in the light polarization plane when light travels through a transparent sensitive garnet (ferrite garnet film, FGF) placed in close contact to the sample. For in-plane magnetized samples, the MO image is not trivially related to the sample magnetization, and to contribute to this understanding we have imaged commercial audio tapes in which computer-generated functions were recorded. We present MO images of periodically in-plane magnetized tapes with square, sawtooth, triangular and sinusoidal waveforms, for which we analytically calculate the perpendicular and parallel stray magnetic field components generated by the tape. As a first approach we correlate the measured light intensity with the perpendicular magnetic field component at the FGF, and we show that it can be approximated to the gradient of the sample magnetization. A more detailed calculation, taking into account the effect of both field components in the Faraday rotation, is presented and satisfactorily compared with the obtained MO images. The presence of magnetic domains in the garnet is shown to be related to the change in sign of the parallel component of the stray magnetic field, which can be approximated to the second derivative of the sample magnetization.