Low temperature hysteresis in high anisotropy systems

This paper is focused on understanding hysteresis in Dy3Al2, which is a member of a class of high anisotropy compounds containing high fractions of rare earth elements with no 3-d transition metals. Analysis of the data suggests that the principal domain wall pinning mechanism does not involve the grain boundaries but instead arises from interactions between either the ferromagnetic glass or the ferromagnetic Dy3Al2 phase with the antiferromagnetic DyAl second phase through an exchange bias mechanism. (C) 2002 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.