Blocking temperature of interacting magnetic nanoparticles with uniaxial and cubic anisotropies from Monte Carlo simulations

Abstract

The low temperature behavior of densely packed interacting spherical single domain nanoparticles (MNP) is investigated by Monte Carlo simulations in the framework of an effective one spin model. The particles are distributed through a hard sphere like distribution with periodic boundary conditions and interact through the dipole dipole interaction (DDI) with an anisotropy energy including both cubic and uniaxial symmetry components. The cubic component is shown to play a sizable role on the value of the blocking temperature Tb only when the MNP easy axes are parallel to the cubic easy direction ([111] direction for a negative cubic anisotropy constant). The nature of the collective low temperature state, either ferromagnetic or spin glass like, is found to depend on the ratio of the anisotropy to the dipolar energies characterizing partly the disorder in the system.