Rare-earth and Bi-substituted iron garnet thin film materials exhibit strong potential for application in various fields of science and frontier optical technologies. Bi-substituted iron garnets possess extraordinary optical and MO properties and are still considered as the best MO functional materials for various emerging integrated optics and photonics applications. However, these MO garnet materials are rarely seen in practical photonics use due to their high optical losses in the visible spectral region. In this paper, we report on the physical properties and magneto-optic behaviour of high-performance RF sputtered highly bismuth-substituted iron garnet and garnet-oxide nanocomposite films of generic composition type (Bi,？Dy/Lu)3(Fe,？Ga/Al)5O12. Our newly synthesized garnet materials form high-quality nanocrystalline thin film layers which demonstrate excellent optical and MO properties suitable for a wide range of applications in integrated optics and photonics. 1. Introduction It is now more than 40 years since the giant magneto-optical effects in bismuth-substituted iron garnets (Bi:IG) were reported first in 1969 and used extensively for fabricating various magnetic recording media. But the synthesis efforts aimed at controlling the properties of Bi:IG compounds containing various metal dopants have started back in 1960s, and different methods were used, including Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD), Liquid Phase Epitaxy (LPE), Ion Beam Sputtering (IBS), Reactive Ion Beam Sputtering (RIBS), Sol-gel process, and RF magnetron sputtering [1–9]. Bi:IGs are still considered to be the best magneto-optic (MO) material type among all known semitransparent materials and are therefore of interest for various optical, MO, and other applications. The extraordinary MO properties of highly Bi-substituted iron garnet materials allow the modulation of the polarisation state and intensity of polarized light by means of applying external magnetic fields on a nanosecond time scale. Highly bismuth-substituted iron garnets are becoming more and more attractive nowadays for various application fields ranging from magnetic data recovery to quantum optical information processing [10–19]. Extensive studies have been conducted by multiple groups working world-wide to synthesize new garnet materials with properties suitable for various emerging technologies and having a high Bi content and also other metal-atom dopants like Ga or Al within the garnet structure. The physical properties (optical, magnetic, and MO) of all garnet materials depend significantly not only on the Bi
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