Superparamagnetic behaviour of metallic Co nanoparticles according to variable temperature magnetic resonance.

Investigating the size distributions of Co nanoparticle ensembles is an important problem, which has no straightforward solution. In this work, we use the combination of 59Co internal field nuclear magnetic resonance (59Co IF NMR) and ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) spectroscopies on a metallic Co nanoparticle sample with a narrow Co nanoparticle size distribution due to encapsulation within the inner channels of carbon nanotubes. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy (TEM) images showed that the nanoparticles can be represented as prolate spheroids, with the majority of particles having an aspect ratio between 1 and 2. This observation has increased the accuracy of superparamagnetic blocking size calculations from Néel relaxation model by introducing the actual volume of the ellipsoids taken from the image processing. 59Co IF NMR and FMR experiments conducted under different temperatures allowed us to observe the thermal blocking of superparamagnetic particles in full accordance with the TEM particle volume distribution. This proved that these magnetic resonance techniques can be used jointly for characterization of Co nanoparticles in the bulk of the sample.