Exploration of a new magnetization-gradient-related magnetooptical effect

A recently discovered magnetooptical effect is explored. The effect consists in a magnetization-gradient-induced birefringence, which manifests itself in unexpected domain boundary contrasts largely independent of the properties of the domain walls. The symmetry properties derived for this effect were confirmed by systematic experiments on silicon iron. For a large variety of materials, the relative magnitude of the effect was measured and found to be of the same order as that of the conventional Kerr effect, but largely independent of the actual wall width. The new effect leads to surprising new aspects of complicated domain patterns which supplement the information obtained from conventional Kerr microscopy