Stabilizing Fe Nanoparticles in the SmCo<sub>5</sub> Matrix.

Shen, Bo; Mendoza-Garcia, Adriana; Baker, Sarah E; McCall, Scott K; Yu, Chao; Wu, Liheng; Sun, Shouheng · Nano Lett · 2017

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

We report a new strategy for stabilizing Fe nanoparticles (NPs) in the preparation of SmCo<sub>5</sub>-Fe nanocomposites. We coat the presynthesized Fe NPs with SiO<sub>2</sub> and assemble the Fe/SiO<sub>2</sub> NPs with Sm-Co-OH to form a mixture. After reductive annealing at 850 °C in the presence of Ca, we obtain SmCo<sub>5</sub>-Fe/SiO<sub>2</sub> composites. Following aqueous NaOH washing and compaction, we produced exchange-coupled SmCo<sub>5</sub>-Fe nanocomposites with Fe NPs controlled at 12 nm. Our work demonstrates a successful strategy of stabilizing high moment magnetic NPs in a hard magnetic matrix to produce a nanocomposite with tunable magnetic properties.