Longitudinal remagnetization of uniaxial antiferromagnetic nanoparticles: the role of spontaneous magnetic moment

Abstract

A kinetic theory of magnetic response of uniaxial antiferromagnetic nanoparticles is presented. Within the developed framework, a particular case when an external field is applied strictly along the anisotropy axis is considered in detail. Analysis of the relaxation spectrum of an antiferromagnetic particle with a spontaneous magnetic moment is performed. It is shown that in a wide frequency range the magnetic response of such particle is determined entirely by the relaxation mode with the longest time. An analytical expression for this time that explicitly contains a value of the decompensation magnetic moment is derived. Also, simple formulae for both static and dynamic longitudinal magnetic susceptibility of an antiferromagnetic nanoparticle are obtained. According to them, longitudinal susceptibility grows quadratically with the value of the spontaneous magnetic moment. Besides, if the latter is not zero, the change of the static susceptibility with temperature turns out to be non-monotonic. The influence of the spontaneous magnetic moment of the particle on the magnetization curves in strong fields is analysed using both energy approach and kinetic theory. The calculated dependences of the dynamic coercivity on the amplitude and variation rate of the applied field are qualitatively compared with experimental data. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Transport phenomena in complex systems (part 2)’.