We report the complete determination of the polarization changes caused in linearly polarized incident light due to propagation in a magneto-optically active terbium gallium garnet (TGG) single crystal, at temperatures ranging from 6.3 to 300 K. A 28-fold increase in the Verdet constant of the TGG crystal is seen as its temperature decreases to 6.3 K. In contrast with polarimetry of light emerging from a Faraday material at room temperature, polarimetry at cryogenic temperatures cannot be carried out using the conventional fixed polarizer-analyzer technique because the assumption that ellipticity is negligible becomes increasingly invalid as temperature is lowered. It is shown that complete determination of light polarization in such a case requires the determination of its Stokes parameters, otherwise inaccurate measurements will result with negative implications for practical devices.
This paper describes a way to measure the radii of curvature of electrons following a curved path in a magnetic field and the radii of the concentric rings resulting from the interference of the electrons inside an evacuated diffraction tube. High-resolution imaging dramatically increases the precision of measurements of physical distances, if they are along circular arcs. Digital photographs were taken and the free software ImageJ that comes with a multitude of image-processing routines and is widely used in life sciences research was employed for measurement and analysis.
We report systematically acquired data on the Verdet constant of terbium gallium garnet for wavelengths ranging from visible to near-infrared (405-830 nm) regime. Our experimental method of Stokes polarimetry is based on the Fourier decomposition of the received light intensity and allows unambiguous determination of both the Faraday rotation and the ellipticity of the emergent light. Temperature-dependent investigations in the range of 8-300 K extend earlier reports and verify the Verdet's constant direct dependence on the magnetization, whose first-order approximation is simply a manifestation of the Curie's law. Further, a least-squares fitting of the experimental data correlates well with theoretical predictions. At a wavelength of 405 nm and temperature of 8 K, the rotation is approximately 500°.
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