Fabrication and magnetic properties of structure-tunable Co2FeGa-SiO2 Heusler nanocompounds

Co2FeGa-SiO2 nanocompounds were chemically synthesized by using SBA-15 as template, which has the L21 Heusler phase. The reactants comprised CoCl2 · 6H2O, Fe(NO3)3 · 9H2O and Ga(NO3) · xH2O with the addition of SBA-15 with different contents. The structure and morphology of the product were controlled by modulating the ratio of reactants to templates. After high-temperature annealing under H2 atmosphere and the removal of the template, the Co2FeGa nanowires, which are of about 125∼200 nm length, 4∼7 nm width and the length-to-width ratio of about 30 were observed by transmission electron microscope. The structure and component of the nanowires were confirmed by selected area electron diffraction, X-ray diffraction and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, respectively. The magnetic test showed that the saturation magnetization (Ms) was 87.5 emu/g for the Co2FeGa nanowires, and the Curie temperature was higher than 380K. The effective anisotropy constant Keff=4.196 × 105 J/m3 was calculated using magnetization curve, which is below the value of bulk Co2FeGa 6.54 × 105 J/m3. The dynamic magnetic properties study performed by ferromagnetic resonance indicated that the Gilbert damping coefficient α were about 0.1944-0.0288 for different samples. The high damping coefficient makes the nanocomposites promising to be used as a microwave absorber in the GHz band.