Determination of critical exponents of inhomogeneous Gd films

The role of inhomogeneity on the critical behavior is studied for non-epitaxial Gd films. For this purpose, the film inhomogeneity was varied experimentally by annealing otherwise identical samples at different temperatures T_AN=200, 400, and 500 °C. Vibrating sample magnetometry (VSM) was used for magnetization M vs. T measurements at different external fields H. A method based upon the linear superposition of different sample parts having different Curie temperatures T_C was used to extract the critical exponents and the intrinsic distribution of Curie temperatures. We found that this method allows extracting reliable values of the critical exponents for all annealing temperatures, which enabled us to study the effects of disorder onto the universality class of Gd films.