Surface-Induced Transverse Magneto-Optical Kerr Effect

Surface magnetism is one of the interesting areas of research with exciting fundamental discoveries and important practical applications.On the other hand, there is a lack of experimental techniques which allow to access the surface (and, especially, interface) magnetism.In this contribution we propose a new linear-optical technique, Surface-Induced Magneto-Optical Kerr Effect (SITMOKE), which can be used to study the magnetism at vicinal surfaces and some low-symmetry surface reconstructions.The most difficult problem in applying optical techniques to surface magnetism is that usually most part of the magneto-optical response is coming from a thick region (several hundreds of A even in the case of metals) so that the weak surface response cannot be discriminated.