Quantitative analyses of surface and bulk magnetization in Nd 2 Fe 14 B and SmCo 5 single crystals: towards understanding the large N eff in nucleation-type magnets

The performance of sintered permanent magnets with nucleation-type coercivity mechanism is largely governed by the magnetic state of thin surface layers of constituent grains, and a deeper insight into magnetization–demagnetization processes occurring in the shell part of the grains is very important for further improvement of hard magnetic materials. In this work, we used Nd 2 Fe 14 B and SmCo 5 single crystals as model objects. By applying magneto-optical Kerr microscopy and conventional magnetometry, we compare the magnetization–demagnetization processes occurring in the thin surface layer and in the volume of both single crystals. We show that upon magnetization along the c -axis, the volume of the single crystals saturates in the field, rigorously determined by demagnetization factor of the bulk sample, whereas in the surface layer a magnetic domain structure exists up to 1.88 T in Nd 2 Fe 14 B and 1.19 T in SmCo 5 regardless of their bulk demagnetization factors. This means that the surface layer with orientation perpendicular to c -axis magnetizes as a thin magnetic film and has an effective demagnetization factor N eff ∼ 1. We also show that this effect can be reproduced in the framework of conventional finite element method modeling but the analytical solution of this problem still needs to be found. We believe that our findings can be useful for understanding of the formation of a high coercive state in nucleation-type permanent magnets, where the phenomenological concept of the large effective demagnetization factor N eff plays an important role.