Magnetic properties of dysprosium – Experiment and modeling

Here we present the continuation of the approach developed in our previous work [1] taking another lanthanide metal – Dy – as an example. The rich set of the experimental data which includes data on magnetization (field and temperature dependencies), magnetic susceptibility, heat capacity, magnetocaloric effect and, finally, the critical field dependence on temperature (phase diagram) allows performing the thorough comparison of experimental and modeling results within the molecular field method. An effective field used in the calculations takes a six-fold temperature dependent anisotropy energy, first and second neighbor exchange and Zeeman energy into account. Such an approach allows not only to underline the common trends for the whole lanthanide series taking Tb, Ho and Dy (in this paper) as examples but also partly eliminate the limitations of ab initio calculation in case of 4f elements.