Applicability of scaling behavior and power laws in the analysis of the magnetocaloric effect in second-order phase transition materials

Carlos Romero-Muñiz, Ryo Tamura, Shu Tanaka, and Victorino Franco
Phys. Rev. B 94, 134401 – Published 3 October 2016

Abstract

In recent years, universal scaling has gained renewed attention in the study of magnetocaloric materials. It has been applied to a wide variety of pure elements and compounds, ranging from rare-earth-based materials to transition metal alloys, from bulk crystalline samples to nanoparticles. It is therefore necessary to quantify the limits within which the scaling laws would remain applicable for magnetocaloric research. For this purpose, a threefold approach has been followed: (a) the magnetocaloric responses of a set of materials with Curie temperatures ranging from 46 to 336 K have been modeled with a mean-field Brillouin model, (b) experimental data for Gd has been analyzed, and (c) a 3D-Ising model—which is beyond the mean-field approximation—has been studied. In this way, we can demonstrate that the conclusions extracted in this work are model-independent. It is found that universal scaling remains applicable up to applied fields, which provide a magnetic energy to the system up to 8% of the thermal energy at the Curie temperature. In this range, the predicted deviations from scaling laws remain below the experimental error margin of carefully performed experiments. Therefore, for materials whose Curie temperature is close to room temperature, scaling laws at the Curie temperature would be applicable for the magnetic field range available at conventional magnetism laboratories (10 T), well above the fields which are usually available for magnetocaloric devices.

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  • Received 28 January 2016
  • Revised 29 June 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.94.134401

©2016 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Carlos Romero-Muñiz1,*, Ryo Tamura2, Shu Tanaka3, and Victorino Franco4

  • 1Departamento de Física Teórica de la Materia Condensada, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, E-28049 Madrid, Spain
  • 2Computational Materials Science Unit, National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), 1-1 Namiki, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0044, Japan
  • 3Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University, 1-6-1 Nishi-Waseda, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 169-8050, Japan
  • 4Departamento de Física de la Materia Condensada, ICMSE-CSIC, Universidad de Sevilla P.O. Box, 1065, 41080 Sevilla, Spain

  • *carlos.romero@uam.es

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Vol. 94, Iss. 13 — 1 October 2016

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