Effect of hydrazine on structural, morphological and magnetic properties of SmCo-Co nanocomposites

In the present work, one-dimensional (1-D) SmCo-Co magnetic nanocomposites are prepared in a single-pot chemical synthesis in the presence of external magnetic field with varying amounts of hydrazine hydrate with samples named as: SC-2 mL, SC-4 mL, SC-6 mL and SC-8 mL. The Rietveld refinement of XRD patterns revealed the formation of Sm2Co17 (P63/mmc), Sm(OH)3 (P63/m) and hcp-Co (P63/mmc) phases. The 1-D nanocomposites are found to possess the highest aspect ratio (∼6.3), lowest crystallite size (∼49 nm) and highest developed strain (∼4.76 x 10−3) corresponding to SC-4 mL. The magnetic response of the samples is found to be affected by the hydrazine amount showing highest saturation magnetization (∼156 emu/g) and effective magnetic anisotropy (∼1.2 x 106 erg/cm3) for SC-4 mL with highest exchange coupling observed using Bloch law fitting. The results indicate suppressing behaviour of hydrazine amount to be utilized up to a certain limit.