Magnetisation process in thin Ni sheets: effect of cold-rolling and re-crystallization annealing

Reversible and irreversible magnetization processes have been investigated in thin Ni sheets by means of flux-metric and alternating-gradient-force magnetometer techniques. Cold-rolled samples exhibit a rotation-dominated process at low fields, and the value of the associated susceptibility, related to the stress-induced and the magnetocrystalline anisotropies, can provide an estimate of the residual stress in the material. Reversible displacements of the domain walls come into play and combine with rotations in the annealed samples. A method is devised, by which domain-wall and rotational contributions to the reversible susceptibility can be singled out. The Rayleigh law always accounts for the behavior of hysteresis loops and losses at low fields, but rotations engender some peculiar evolution of the related parameters and their relationship with the coercive field. Magnetic softening by stress relief is assessed, as a whole, through Preisach analysis. It is found that the local stochastic coercive fields can be described by means of a Lorentzian distribution function, whose relative width is minimum in the cold-rolled material. By removing the internal stresses through recrystallizationannealing, the contribution of grain boundaries and surface effects to coercivity is put in evidence, with the latter apparently posing the major restraints to domain-wall motion for grain sizes larger than the sheet thickness.