Faraday effect enhancement in Co–ferrite layer incorporated into one-dimensional photonic crystal working as a Fabry–Pe´rot resonator.

We fabricated a one-dimensional magnetophotonic crystal (MPC), in which a magnetic layer of Co–ferrite (∼40 nm in thickness) is sandwiched by a couple of dielectric multilayer reflectors with (SiO[sub 2]/TiO[sub 2])×7 structure. The Co–ferrite layer was synthesized by ferrite plating from aqueous solution at 90 °C. The MPC is so designed to enhance magneto-optical Faraday rotation θ[sub F] at the Fabry–Pe´rot resonance wavelength λ of the multilayer structure. θ[sub F] was observed to increase by factor of ∼5.4, but at λ=∼620 nm which is deviated from the target resonance (λ=740 nm) and at very weak transmissivity. This may be because the Co–ferrite layer is rough in surface and smaller in thickness than the target thickness at which Fabry–Pe´rot resonance is designed to occur. © 2000 American Institute of Physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]