AIMD study and experimental verification of Ge-doped Fe80P13C7 amorphous soft magnetic alloys

Abstract

Fe80P13-xC7Gex (x = 0, 2, 4) amorphous alloys were synthesized by rapid solidification technique and studied using Ab-initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) and first-principles calculations based on density-functional theory (DFT) for their electronic structures. Brillouin function was used to calculate saturation magnetization (µ0MS) at elevated temperatures utilizing experimentally measured Curie temperature (TC) and µ0MS at 0 K calculated by DFT.To verify the calculated µ0MS, ingots of Fe80P13-xC7Gex (x = 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) alloy were prepared by melt-spinning. An increase in experimental µ0MS with Ge concentration agrees with the calculated µ0MS. TC also increases with Ge concentration. Partial substitution of Ge for P enhances the µ0MS to 1.63 T (x = 4) from 1.46 T (x = 0), which indicated that the Fe80P13-xC7Gex (x = 4) shows optimum soft magnetic properties.