Ad. Boardman et al., PHOTOCONDUCTING FILM INTEGRATED IN A MAGNETOOPTICAL MULTILAYER STRUCTURE - A NEW WAY TO GET BISTABLE AND UNSTABLE OPERATIONS, IEEE transactions on magnetics, 29(6), 1993, pp. 3414-3416
TE/TM polarised light reflection from a multilayer structure containin
g a magneto-optic and a photoconducting film is investigated theoretic
ally. A metal film is used whose thickness is chosen to support long-r
ange surface plasmons. This is to use their sharp resonance for tuning
the whole structure. The off-diagonal elements of the dielectric tens
or are epsilon(12) = -epsilon(21) = ig and these can be switched from
g = 0.05 to g = -0.05. Light tunnelling in the photoconducting layer c
auses the appearance of a current that can re orient the magnetisation
from M to -M (g = -0.05). The switching occurs at 0.5 mW given an ini
tial value g = 0.05. The back re orientation -M --> M, as the light in
tensity is reduced, occurs at only 0.1 mW. Hence it is shown that TE r
eflected light will exhibit a novel bistable dependence.