Institute of Fundamental Technological Research

Optical properties of a composite material made of ferromagnetic metal nanoparticles embedded in a dielectric host are studied. We constructed an effective dielectric tensor of the composite material taking into account the orientational distribution of nanoparticle magnetic moments in external magnetic field. A nonlinear dependence of the optical rotation on magnetic field resulting from the reorientation of nanoparticles is demonstrated. The theoretical findings were applied to the magneto-optical experimental data of cobalt ferromagnetic nanoparticles embedded in a dielectric liquid host. The dependence of the Faraday rotation on Co-based ferromagnetic nanoparticles was measured as a function of the external magnetic field, varying the size of nanoparticles and the wavelength of light. The proposed approach enables quantitative determination of the magnetic moment and the plasma frequency of a single nanoparticle, and from this the size of the nonmagnetic shell of magnetic nanoparticles.

We report the theoretical study of the optical response of a periodically modulated two-dimensional electron gas. The density of states is calculated within the first order of the perturbation theory and the effects of the short-range disorder are explained and discussed. We demonstrate that the magnetic field values corresponding to the characteristic narrowing of the density of states width are given by the zeros of the subsequent Laguerre polynomials. The observed increase of the density of states at the edges are interpreted as van Hove singularities. The broadening effects are shown to modify and smear out the observed effects with increasing temperature above 2 K. The plasmon dispersion relation is discussed in terms of the random phase approximation. Small changes in plasmon dispersion relation related to the periodic modulation were predicted.