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MA: Fachverband Magnetismus

MA 51: Magnetic Half-metals and Oxides II

MA 51.2: Talk

Thursday, March 17, 2011, 11:15–11:30, HSZ 401

Quadratic MOKE on Co-based Heusler compounds — •Georg Wolf¹, Jaroslav Hamrle², Britta Leven¹, Daniel Ebke³, Andy Thomas³, Günter Reiss³, and Burkard Hillebrands¹ — ¹FB Physik and Landesforschungszentrum OPTIMAS, TU Kaiserslautern, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany — ²Institute of Physics, VSB - Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic — ³Thin Films and Physics of Nanostructures, Physics Department, Bielefeld University, Germany

The intensive research on Co-based Heusler compounds revealed that some of these materials show a large quadratic magneto-optical Kerr effect (QMOKE) [1,2]. The presence of QMOKE strongly depends on the electronic band structure. In the case of Heusler compounds the electronic bands can be modified by changing the composition or improving the crystalline structure. This work presents a systematic study on several Heusler compounds (Co₂FeSi, Co₂Fe_0.5Mn_0.5Si, Co₂MnSi and Co₂FeAl_0.5Si_0.5). The amplitude of the QMOKE is investigated as a function of the post deposition annealing temperature, which is known to improve the crystal ordering. We find that the QMOKE is increasing with the annealing temperature. From this we conclude that there is a strong correlation between the presence of QMOKE and the high crystalline ordering in Heusler compounds.
The DFG Research Unit 559, New Materials with High Spin Polarization, and the BMBF project Heuspin are gratefully acknowledged for financial support.
J. Hamrle et al. J.Phys.D 40, 1563 (2007).
S. Trudel et al. J.Appl.Phys. 107, 43912 (2010).