Monte Carlo studies of directional pair ordering in disordered binary and ternary ferromagnetic BCC crystalline alloys

Magnetic field annealing can be used to induce uniaxial magnetic anisotropy in ferromagnetic alloys, which is often desirable, for example, to reduce core losses in materials of interest for high frequency inductive components in power conversion applications. An understanding of the compositional dependence of the uniaxial induced anisotropy constant KU is important to develop materials for such applications. In this work, Monte Carlo studies of directional pair ordering in bcc crystalline alloys using the Néel pair model and a Metropolis-type algorithm are reported. The compositional dependence of KU in disordered binary alloys is compared with analytical results and extended to the calculation of KU for ternary alloys. An approximate XB 2 1−XB 2 functional dependence of KU is observed for binary alloys, where XB is the atomic fraction of one of the atomic species. For ternary alloys a more complicated functional dependence is observed. These results are used to critically evaluate the potential for increasing KU through ternary alloying additions to binary ferromagnetic alloys. © 2007 American Institute of Physics. DOI: 10.1063/1.2711389