Magnetic spin exchange interaction in SmCo/Co nanocomposite magnet for large energy product.

Magnetic spin exchange-coupled magnets have been investigated for obtaining an enhanced energy product, however, approaches at the nanoscale have been greatly restricted because of the lack of consideration of the relationships among the individual components. Here, we suggest a facile strategy for fabricating exchange-coupled nanomagnets with a large energy product. As a bottom-up approach, this work introduces a combined thermal decomposition and reduction/diffusion process to obtain a magnetic spin exchange coupled SmCo/Co nanocomposite magnet. The SmCo/Co nanocomposite magnet was fabricated through a three-step approach: (1) chemical synthesis of Co@SmO nanoparticles and Co nanoparticles as hard and soft magnetic phases, respectively, (2) 3-dimensional alternating arrangement of both magnetic phases and (3) a reduction/diffusion process for the magnetic spin exchange interaction. Our results demonstrate that an effective magnetic spin exchange interaction strongly depends on the dimension and arrangement of the hard and soft phases, which were synthetically tuned to be within the magnetic domain wall size.