Enhanced nucleation fields due to dipolar interactions in nanocomposite magnets

One approach to construct powerful permanent magnets while using less rare-earth elements is to combine a hard magnetic material having a high coercive field with a soft magnetic material having a high saturation magnetization at the nanometer scale and create so-called nanocomposite magnets. If both materials are strongly coupled, exchange forces will form a stable magnet. We use finite element micromagnetics simulations to investigate the changing hysteresis properties for varying arrays of soft magnetic spherical inclusions in a hard magnetic body. We show that the anisotropy arising from dipolar interactions between soft magnetic particles in a hard magnetic matrix can enhance the nucleation field by more than 10% and strongly depends on the arrangement of the inclusions.