Enhanced Magneto-Optical Activities of Modulated Fe-Pt Multilayer Metamaterials

Enhancing the magneto-optical (MO) response of magnetic films and nanostructures is an important issue for a wide variety of applications, including biosensing. Past success via multilayer stacking has been focused primarily on symmetric or periodic geometries. Here, however, the authors find that a quasiperiodic structure exhibits a far larger MO response than a similar periodic structure, over a broad spectral range, even though both samples have otherwise very similar magnetic and optical properties. Model calculations based on local optical properties fail to describe this behavior; more fundamental, nonlocal effects must be the origin of the massively enhanced MO signal.