A quantitative criterion for determining the order of magnetic phase transitions using the magnetocaloric effect

Jia Yan Law, Victorino Franco (), Luis Miguel Moreno-Ramírez, Alejandro Conde, Dmitriy Y. Karpenkov, Iliya Radulov, Konstantin P. Skokov and Oliver Gutfleisch
Additional contact information
Jia Yan Law: Universidad de Sevilla
Victorino Franco: Universidad de Sevilla
Luis Miguel Moreno-Ramírez: Universidad de Sevilla
Alejandro Conde: Universidad de Sevilla
Dmitriy Y. Karpenkov: Technische Universität Darmstadt
Iliya Radulov: Technische Universität Darmstadt
Konstantin P. Skokov: Technische Universität Darmstadt
Oliver Gutfleisch: Technische Universität Darmstadt

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract The ideal magnetocaloric material would lay at the borderline of a first-order and a second-order phase transition. Hence, it is crucial to unambiguously determine the order of phase transitions for both applied magnetocaloric research as well as the characterization of other phase change materials. Although Ehrenfest provided a conceptually simple definition of the order of a phase transition, the known techniques for its determination based on magnetic measurements either provide erroneous results for specific cases or require extensive data analysis that depends on subjective appreciations of qualitative features of the data. Here we report a quantitative fingerprint of first-order thermomagnetic phase transitions: the exponent n from field dependence of magnetic entropy change presents a maximum of n > 2 only for first-order thermomagnetic phase transitions. This model-independent parameter allows evaluating the order of phase transition without any subjective interpretations, as we show for different types of materials and for the Bean–Rodbell model.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05111-w Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:9:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-018-05111-w

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-05111-w

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().