CALCULATION OF SPIN-REORIENTATION TEMPERATURE IN ND2FE14B

The spin-reorientation phenomenon in Nd2Fe14B has been investigated using an angular dependent free energy approach. A magnetic Hamiltonian which includes the crystal electric field term and the exchange term has been established using realistic band structure results. The temperature dependence of the molecular field is accounted for by introducing the Brillouin function and the magnetic Hamiltonian is diagonalized within the ground state multiplet of the Nd ion. The eigenstates are then used to form the partition function for the free energy. At each temperature, the direction of the molecular field is obtained by searching for the minimum in the angular parameter space of the free energy. Our calculations show that for Nd2Fe14B, the net magnetic anisotropy direction is canted away from the c axis at a temperature close to the experimentally reported spin-reorientation temperature of 150 K. The temperature dependence of the magnetic structure is found to be very sensitive to the size of the second order crystal field parameter B20.