The effects of magnetic annealing of transition metal alloysdeduced from ab initio electronic structure calculations

Abstract

A theory is presented for describing the effects of annealingmagnetic alloys in magnetic fields. It has an ab initiospin-polarized relativistic Korringa-Kohn-Rostokercoherent potential approximation (KKR-CPA) electronic structure basis anduses the framework of concentration waves. Alloys which wouldotherwise be soft magnets are found experimentally to developdirectional chemical order and significant uniaxial anisotropy whenannealed in magnetic fields. Our approach is able to provide aquantitative description of these effects together with theunderlying electronic mechanisms. We describe applications to thesoft magnetic alloys permalloy and FeCo.