ON THE ELECTRONIC STRUCTURE OF CrO2: NEW EXPERIMENTS AND THEORY

Spectroscopic investigations of the optical constants n and k and the magneto-optical polar Kerr effects θK and eK were used to deterimine the diagonal and off-diagonal conductivity tensor elements of CrO2 in the energy range 0.8-5eV. The data can be readily explained on the basis of self-consistent spin-polarized bandstructure calculations. A direct comparison of the measured and calculated diagonal optical conductivity is presented for the first time, which can be viewed as experimental confirmation of the ab initio calculated bandstructure of CrO2.