“…The mechanisms determining the contrast of magnetic domain imaging are the magneto-optical Faraday and Kerr effects [10] in the transmission and reflection geometries, respectively, relying on the changes in polarisation of the incident light and/or the reflectance. Previously, a number of works have been done for the application of SNOM to the observation of magnetic domains, including transmission mode [11,12], reflection mode which is more versatile for opaque or metallic ferromagnetic structures [13][14][15] and SNOM with optical second-harmonic generation [16,17]. Most of these works are focused on the magnetic domain imaging whose magnetisation is oriented perpendicular to the surface, and only a small number report the imaging of magnetic domains that have in-plane magnetisation direction [12].…”