Role of anisotropy and interactions in magnetic nanoparticle systems

Magnetic nanoparticle systems are characterized by several competing effects like anisotropy, an inherent disorder, the long range dipolar and the short range exchange interactions due to clustering effects. The sensitivity of the observed static and dynamical properties of these systems like the blocking temperature, the hysteresis and the susceptibility, to the methods of preparation, annealing and the resulting morphology is a manifestation of this. However, given the complexity of the system, it is often difficult to isolate the effects which might be dominant in a particular sample, which has a direct bearing on the desired applications. In this paper we report the effects of anisotropy, interactions and particle concentration on the temperature dependent remanence and coercivity through a numerical simulation on an array of single domain magnetic particles which incorporates all the above mentioned factors. Our results show that it is possible to distinguish between purely anisotropic systems and interacting systems with these measurements. In confirmation of our simulation results we also present the experimental results on the remanence and coercivity of nanomagnetic nickel ferrite composites. Copyright EDP Sciences, SIF, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010