Direct measurement of the static and transient magneto-optical permittivity of cobalt across the entire M-edge in reflection geometry by use of polarization scanning

Abstract

The microscopic state of amagnetic material is characterized by its resonant magneto-optical response through the off-diagonal dielectric tensor component epsilon(xy). However, the measurement of the full complex epsilon(xy) in the extreme ultraviolet spectral region covering the M absorption edges of 3d ferromagnets is challenging due to the need for either a careful polarization analysis, which is complicated by a lack of efficient polarization analyzers, or scanning the angle of incidence in fine steps. Here, we propose and demonstrate a technique to extract the complex resonant permittivity epsilon(xy) simply by scanning the polarization angle of linearly polarized high harmonics to measure the magneto-optical asymmetry in reflection geometry. Because this technique is more practical and faster to experimentally implement than previous approaches, we can directly measure the full time evolution of epsilon(xy)(t) during laser-induced demagnetization across the entire M-2,M-3 absorption edge of cobalt with femtosecond time resolution. We find that for polycrystalline Co films on an insulating substrate, the changes in epsilon(xy) are uniform throughout the spectrum, to within our experimental precision. This result suggests that, in the regime of strong demagnetization, the ultrafast demagnetization response is primarily dominated by magnon generation. We estimate the contribution of exchange-splitting reduction to the ultrafast demagnetization process to be no more than 25%.