Planar magnetization Bi-doped garnet thin-films were successfully grown for magneto-optical imaging applications. These films are grown using the liquid phase epitaxy method, which produces single crystal, high quality films.

The melt composition that is used to grow these garnets is selected in order to produce planar magnetization films with low magneto-crystalline and uniaxial anisotropies. Also, this melt composition is designed to incorporate more bismuth into the film, thereby increasing the specific Faraday rotation of the film. This effectively tailors the films to be highly sensitive to spatial magnetic field distributions.

The garnet films that are grown from this process are characterized by measuring their ferromagnetic resonance, which allows their magneto-crystalline and uniaxial anisotropies to be determined.

An imager system that utilizes these garnet films has also been developed to visualize magnetic recording from cassette tapes. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) uses these captured images for forensic applications.