A.F. Rebolledo, J.J. Romero, R. Cuadrado, J.M. Gonzalez, F. Pigazo, F.J. Palomares, M.H. Medina, G.A. Perez Alcazar

The FeMnAl-disordered alloy system exhibits, depending on the composition and the temperature, a rich variety of magnetic phases including the occurrence of ferromagnetism, antiferromagnetism, paramagnetism and spin-glass and reentrant spin glass behaviors. These latter phases result from the presence of atomic disorder and magnetic dilution and from the competing exchange interactions taking place between an Fe atom and its Mn and Fe first neighbors. The use of mechanical alloying in order to prepare these alloys is specially interesting since it allows to introduce in a progressive way large amounts of disorder. In this work, we describe the evolution with the milling time of the temperature dependence of the magnetic properties of mechanically alloyed Fe0.6Mn0.1Al0.3 samples. The materials were prepared in a planetary ball mill using a balls-to-powder mass ratio of 15:1 and pure (99.95 at%) Fe, Mn and Al powders for times up to 19 h. The X-rays diffraction (XRD) spectra show the coexistence of three phases at short milling times. For milling times over 6 h, only the FeMnAl ternary alloy BCC phase is observed. Mo¨ sbauer spectroscopy reveals the complete formation of the FeMnAl alloy after 9 h milling time. The magnetic characterization showed that all the samples were ferromagnetic at room temperature with coercivities decreasing from 105 Oe (3 h milled sample) down to 5Oe in the case of the sample milled for 19 h.