Coercivity mechanisms in nanostructured permanent magnets*

Abstract

Coercivity mechanism in permanent magnets has been debated for many years. In this paper, various models of the coercivity mechanism are classified and re-examined by the comparison and contrast. Coherent rotation and curling models can reveal the underlying reversal mechanism clearly based on isolated grains with elliptic shapes. By contrast, the numerical methods consider inter-grain interactions while simulating the evolution of the spins and hysteresis loops with complicated shapes. However, an exact simulation of magnetic reversal in permanent nanomagnets requires many meshes to mimic the thin domain wall well. Nucleation and pinning are the two main coercivity mechanisms in permanent magnets. The former signifies the beginning of the magnetic reversal, whilst the latter completes it. Recently, it is proposed that the large difference between the intrinsic magnetic properties of the nucleation centers and those of the main phase can result in a large pinning field (self-pinning), which has the attributes of both traditional nucleation and pinning. Such a pinning explains the experimental data of permanent magnets very well, including the enhancement of the coercivity by the grain boundary pinning.