Frontiers in Magneto-optics of Magnetophotonic Crystals

The recently published and new results on design and fabrication of magnetophotonic crystals of different dimensionality are surveyed. Coupling of polarized light to 3D photonic crystals based on synthetic opals was studied in the case of low dielectric contrast. Transmissivity of opals was demonstrated to strongly depend on the propagation direction of light and its polarization. It was shown that in a vicinity of the frequency of a single Bragg resonance in a 3D photonic crystal the incident linearly polarized light excites inside the crystal the TE- and TM-eigen modes which passing through the crystal is influenced by Brags diffraction of electromagnetic field from different (hkl) sets of crystallographic planes. We also measured the faraday effect of opals immersed in a magneto-optically active liquid. It was shown that the behavior of the faraday rotation spectrum of the system of the opal sample and magneto-optically active liquid directly interrelates with transmittance anisotropy of the opal sample. The photonic band structure, transmittance and Faraday rotation of the light in three-dimensional magnetophotonic crystals of simple cubic and face centered cubic lattices formed from magneto-optically active spheres where studied by the layer Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker method. We found that a photonic band structure is most significantly altered by the magneto-optical activity of spheres for the high-symmetry directions where the degeneracies between TE and TM polarized modes for the corresponding non-magnetic photonic crystals exist. The significant enhancement of the Faraday rotation appears for these directions in the proximity of the band edges, because of the slowing down of the light. New approaches for one-dimensional magnetophotonic crystals fabrication optimized for the magneto-optical Faraday effect enhancement are proposed and realized. One-dimensional magnetophotonic crystals utilizing the second and the third photonic band gaps optimized for the Faraday effect enhancement have been successfully fabricated. Additionally, magnetophotonic crystals consist of a stack of ferrimagnetic Bi-substituted yttrium-iron garnet layers alternated with dielectric silicon oxide layers of the same optical thickness. High refractive index difference provides the strong spatial localization of the electromagnetic field with the wavelength corresponding to the long-wavelength edge of the photonic band gap.