Distortions of the statistical distribution of Barkhausen noise measured by magneto-optical Kerr effect

In magneto-optical Kerr measurements of the Barkhausen noise, a magnetization jump ΔM due to a domain reversal produces a variation ΔI of the intensity of a laser beam reflected by the sample, which is the physical quantity actually measured. Due to the non-uniform beam intensity profile, the magnitude of ΔI depends both on ΔM and on its position on the laser spot. This could distort the statistical distribution p(ΔI) of the measured ΔI with respect to the true distribution p(ΔM) of the magnetization jumps ΔM. In this work the exact relationship between the two distributions is derived in a general form, which will be applied to some possible beam profiles. It will be shown that in most cases the usual Gaussian beam produces a negligible statistical distortion. Moreover, for small ΔI the noise of the experimental setup can also distort the statistical distribution p(ΔI), by erroneously rejecting small ΔI as noise. This effect has been calculated for white noise, and it will be shown that it is relatively small but not totally negligible as the measured ΔI approaches the detection limit.