Department of Physics and Astronomy: Publications and Other Research

 

Date of this Version

2012

Citation

JOURNAL OF APPLIED PHYSICS 111, 07B535 (2012); doi:10.1063/1.3679085

Comments

Copyright VC 2012 American Institute of Physics

Abstract

In this work, single crystal L10 FePt nanocubes have been successfully produced by a cluster beam deposition technique without the need of post annealing. Particles have been deposited by dc magnetron sputtering using high Ar pressures on both single crystal Si substrates and Au grids for the measurement of magnetic and structural properties, respectively. The nanocubes have a uniform size distribution with an average size of 5nm. At 1 Torr, the particles have the L10 structure with an order parameter of 0.5 and a RT coercivity of 2 kOe with high switching fields observed in the hysteresis loop. Further annealing increased the particle size to 20nm and the RT coercivity to 10.2 kOe with perfect chemical ordering. In addition to these nanocubes, micron size rods with the L10 structure have been observed near the cluster gun. SEM analysis showed that these rods consist of nanoparticles with 20nm average size. Surfactant assisted high-energy ball milling has been used to separate the nanoparticles from the rods. After one hour of milling, these 20 nm particles showed a room temperature coercivity of 9 kOe with an order parameter of 0.85. These FePt nanocubes have a potential for use in the development of future high-density magnetic recording media because of their high coercivity, good shape and very narrow size distribution.

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