Thermal Expansion and Local Environment Effects in Ferromagnetic Iron-Based Alloys -A Theoretical Study

The Nobel Prize for Physics 1920 was awarded to C.-E. Guillaume for his discovery of properties of nickel steels. He had previously observed that certain iron-nickel alloys exhibit the Invar effect i.e. an extremely low thermal expansion coefficient over a wide range of temperature. The decades since then have seen the observation of similar phenomena in other iron-based materials such as iron-platinum and iron-palladium. Moreover, there has been a great deal of theoretical work on the mechanism behind the Invar anomaly in the above-mentioned systems. However, despite many years of intensive research, a widely accepted microscopic theory of the effects is still lacking. The present thesis aims at providing an insight into the physical nature of the thermal expansion of ferromagnetic random face-centered cubic iron-nickel, ironplatinum and iron-palladium bulk solids. First, the thermal expansion coefficient is modeled as a function of temperature. The theory relies on the disordered local moment (DLM) formalism. However, contrary to all the previous models, the mapping between equilibrium states and partially disordered local moment (PDLM) states involves the probability that an iron-iron nearest-neighbour pair shows anti-parallel local magnetic moments, and the average lattice constant of the system at a finite temperature is calculated by minimization of an energy. The approach is applied to iron-nickel alloys. The model qualitatively reproduces several experimentally observed properties of disordered fcc iron-nickel solids. This includes Guillaume’s famous plot of the thermal expansion coefficient at room temperature as a function of concentration. Second, for the purpose of studying the origin of the anomalous expansion, the anomalous and normal contributions to the thermal expansion coefficient are defined, then evaluated for iron-nickel alloys. The results support the idea that the peculiar behaviour of the expansivity, α, originates solely from the anomalous contribution, αa. Subsequently, the anomalous contribution is modeled for iron-nickel systems. In formulating the model, the following observation is taken into account; the average lattice spacing of an Fe100−xNix alloy at temperature T in a partially disordered local moment state is strongly negatively correlated with the probability that a nearest-neighbour pair has each of its two sites occupied by an iron atom and exhibits anti-ferromagnetically aligned magnetic moments (XFFAP). The quantity αa(x, T ) is estimated for several couples of values of the parameters x and T . Model results are found to agree qualitatively and quantitatively well with data