Eur. Phys. J. B (2013) 86: 100
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2013-30938-1

Regular Article

Enhanced nucleation fields due to dipolar interactions in nanocomposite magnets^*

St. Poelten University of Applied Sciences, Matthias Corvinus-Strasse 15, 3100 St. Poelten, Austria

^a e-mail: Johann.Fischbacher@fhstp.ac.at

Received: 12 October 2012
Received in final form: 9 January 2013
Published online: 18 March 2013

Abstract

One approach to construct powerful permanent magnets while using less rare-earth elements is to combine a hard magnetic material having a high coercive field with a soft magnetic material having a high saturation magnetization at the nanometer scale and create so-called nanocomposite magnets. If both materials are strongly coupled, exchange forces will form a stable magnet. We use finite element micromagnetics simulations to investigate the changing hysteresis properties for varying arrays of soft magnetic spherical inclusions in a hard magnetic body. We show that the anisotropy arising from dipolar interactions between soft magnetic particles in a hard magnetic matrix can enhance the nucleation field by more than 10% and strongly depends on the arrangement of the inclusions.