Elemental maps of a 350 nm thick NdFe12Nx thin film.
Elemental maps of a 350 nm thick NdFe12Nx thin film.

The NdFe12Nx compound with a ThMn12 structure (space group I4/mmm) was successfully synthesized by nitriding an NdFe12 layer grown on a W underlayer on a single-crystalline MgO(001) substrate. The c-axis expanded from 0.480 to 0.492 nm while the a-axis showed a slight contraction from 0.852 to 0.849 nm after the nitriding. Excellent intrinsic hard magnetic properties of μ0Ms ≈ 1.66 ± 0.08 T, μ0Ha ≈ 8 T, and Tc ≈ 550 °C, which are superior to those of Nd2Fe14B, were obtained.

This paper was originally published in Scripta Materialia (2014).

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