Properties of polycrystalline nanoparticles with uniaxial and cubic types of magnetic anisotropy of individual grains

TL;DR

This study uses numerical simulations to analyze how crystal structure inhomogeneities affect the magnetic properties of various polycrystalline nanoparticles, revealing significant effects for uniaxial anisotropy but minimal impact for cubic anisotropy.

Contribution

It introduces a model subdividing nanoparticles into single-crystal granules with random anisotropy axes to study their magnetic states and effective single-domain sizes.

Findings

Subdivision reduces effective single-domain size for uniaxial anisotropy particles.

Cubic anisotropy particles are less affected by crystal inhomogeneities.

Magnetically soft magnetite nanoparticles show negligible influence from inhomogeneities.

Abstract

The influence of the crystal structure inhomogeneities on the magnetic properties of cobalt nanoparticles with different aspect ratio and spherical nanoparticles of chromium dioxide, cobalt ferrite and magnetite has been studied by means of numerical simulation. The polycrystalline nanoparticles are modeled by means of subdivision of the nanoparticle volume into tightly bound single-crystal granules with randomly distributed directions of the easy anisotropy axes. The probability of appearance of quasi uniform and vortex states in sufficiently large assemblies of polycrystalline nanoparticles of various types have been calculated depending on the nanoparticle diameter. It is shown that the subdivision of a nanoparticle into single-crystal granules with different orientations of the easy anisotropy axes substantially reduces the effective single-domain diameters for particles with uniaxial type of anisotropy of individual granules. However, for particles with cubic type of magnetic anisotropy the influence of the crystal structure inhomogeneities on the equilibrium properties of the particles is not so important even for magnetically hard cobalt ferrite nanoparticles. It is practically absent for magnetically soft magnetite nanoparticles.