Tuning the magnetic anisotropy in nanostructured magnetic oxides

Among nanostructured magnetic materials, nanoparticles (NPs) are unique complex physical objects: in these systems a multidomain organization is energetically unfavorable and single-magnetic-domain particles are formed, each one with a huge magnetic moment with comparison to that of single atoms, thus they are often named “supermoment”. The attractive performance of magnetic NPs based materials are appealing for several technological fields ranging from nanomedicine to high-density magneto recording. Thus, understanding the physics of magnetic nanoparticles and controlling their magnetic properties represent hot topics not only for fundamental studies but also for technological applications. The magnetic behavior of such entities is related to the reversal of their magnetization; this can be a thermal or a field activated transition, which is characterized by an energy barrier defined as a magnetic anisotropy energy (MAE), which is influenced by several parameters. Thus, the tuning of the magnetic properties of nanoparticles means control of the MAE. In this work it will be discussed how to tune the MAE at the nanoscale showing the main parameters that can influence the anisotropy itself. It will be investigated the role of particle volume in the effective anisotropy, and its correlation with the surface contribution, exploring its strong effect with particle size below 10 nm. In this framework it will be investigated the role of organic coating, underlining its ability to reduce the magnetic disorder arising from the broken symmetry at particles surface. In addition, in nanoparticle ensemble, the MAE may differ from one particle to another due to particles size and shape distributions. Thus it will be defined a detailed statistical analysis of particles’ morphology, leading to the development of a new instrument to analyze particles morphology, called “aspect maps”. The relation between the physical chemical structures of nanoparticles will be investigated on nickel doped cobalt ferrite samples, demonstrating how to tune the MAE by chemical composition, i.e., controlling magnetocrystalline anisotropy. Furthermore it will be analyzed the evolution of interparticles interactions with respect single particle magnetic anisotropy by means of a modified random anisotropy model. The last part of this work will deal with the design of novel nanostructured composites. La0.67Ca0.33MnO3 and CoFe2O4 will be combined using two different structures, which can be easily extent to other materials, to improve their magnetic interactions in order to obtain tunable magnetotrasport proprieties of the final composites.