Inverse faraday effect as mechanism for ultrafast all-optical magnetic switching

The mechanisms underlying helicity dependent AOS are currently under debate. So far, models have been based on the existence of the inverse Faraday effect, a magnetization component which is induced by the circularly polarised light. In this abstract, we investigate helicity dependent AOS in FePt theoretically. For that, in a first step, we employ ab initio methods to calculate the laser-power and photon frequency dependence of the inverse Faraday field and, in a second step, we calculate the magnetization dynamics triggered by the laser pulse via the thermal heating effect and the inverse Faraday field based on the Landau-Lifshitz-Bloch equation of motion for high-temperature magnetization dynamics.