Origin of the stress-induced magnetic anisotropy in Fe-based nanocrystalline alloy

In this study, the presence of structural anisotropy in stress-annealed Fe-Si-B-Nb-Cu nanocrystalline alloy was investigated. Also, the origin of this large magnetic anisotropy induced by the stress-annealing was discussed. Melt-spun amorphous ribbons with a composition of Fe/sub 73.5/Si/sub 15.5/B/sub 7/Nb/sub 3/Cu were heated to 550/spl deg/C. A tensile stress was applied to the ribbons during the entire annealing process. X-ray diffraction profiles of the samples were measured in the transmission mode. Results showed that increasing the tensile stress induces a large anisotropy of the spacing of the [310] plane. In addition, the results revealed that the origin of the anisotropic energy is the magneto-elastic effect.