Structural and magnetic properties of metastable fcc Cu-Fe alloys

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Fully dense bulk nanocomposites have been obtained by a novel two-step severe plastic deformation process in the immiscible Fe-Cu system. Elemental micrometer-sized Cu and Fe powders were first mixed in different compositions and subsequently high-pressure-torsion-consolidated and deformed in a two-step deformation process. Scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction and atom probe investigations were performed to study the evolving far-from-equilibrium nanostructures which were observed at all compositions. For lower and higher Cu contents complete solid solutions of Cu in Fe and Fe in Cu, respectively, are obtained. In the near 50% regime a solid solution face-centred cubic and solid solution body-centred cubic nanograined composite has been formed. After an annealing treatment, these solid solutions decompose and form two-phase nanostructured Fe-Cu composites with a high hardness and an enhanced thermal stability. The grain size of the composites retained nanocrystalline up to high annealing temperatures.

Superferromagnetism in mechanically alloyed fcc Fe(23)Cu(77) with bimodal cluster size distribution

Magnetic measurements, x-ray diffraction and Mössbauer spectroscopy were used to characterize a nanostructured fcc Fe(23)Cu(77) at.% alloy prepared by high-energy ball-milling, addressing in particular the effect of clustering on the nature of the interacting magnetic entities. The interpretation of magnetization measurements leads to the conclusion that grains, whose mean size is ∼16 nm, contain two populations of magnetic Fe-rich nanoclusters with a bimodal size distribution. These two sets of clusters contain about 14 and 400 Fe atoms and have magnetic moments of 30 µ(B) and 860 µ(B), respectively. The inter-cluster ferromagnetic interactions that lead to superferromagnetism with a Curie temperature T(C)∼220 K can be described by a mean field determined by the smaller clusters only, which account for 90% of the magnetization.