Electrical control of Faraday rotation at a liquid-liquid interface
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Updated: Apr 16, 2026

The Preparation of Electrohydrodynamic Bridges from Polar Dielectric Liquids
Published on: September 30, 2014
Monica Marinescu1, Alexei A Kornyshev, Michael E Flatté
1Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College, London, SW7 2AZ, UK. m.marinescu@imperial.ac.uk.
Abstract:
A theory is developed for the Faraday rotation of light from a monolayer of charged magnetic nanoparticles at an electrified liquid-liquid interface. The polarization fields of neighboring nanoparticles enhance the Faraday rotation. At such interfaces, and for realistic sizes and charges of nanoparticles, their adsorption-desorption can be controlled with a voltage variation<1 V, providing electrovariable Faraday rotation. A calculation based on the Maxwell-Garnett theory predicts that the corresponding redistribution of 40 nm nanoparticles of yttrium iron garnet can switch a cavity with a quality factor larger than 10(4) for light of wavelength 500 nm at normal incidence.
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