Control of Diffracted Magneto-Optical Enhancement in Ni Gratings

The so-called diffracted magneto-optical (MO) effects, in which the MO responses of diffracted beams are measured in the off-specular geometry, have been utilized to change the amplitude and the sign of MO signals. An enhancement of MO effect of the first-order diffraction was found. In this paper, the rigorous coupled-wave analysis implemented as Airy-like internal reflection series was developed to simulate the diffracted longitudinal MO Kerr effect. We demonstrate that the enhancement of the MO effect is controllable for a certain diffraction order by adjusting the geometrical parameters of Ni gratings. Furthermore, it is believed that the absolute magnitude and the MO enhancement can be more effectively tuned by designing the grating profile and carefully selecting the gyrotropic materials.