On the coercivity of RCo5compounds

RCo5Compounds are metastable at room temperature and contain disordered cobalt atom pairs. A pair of atoms creates a zone in which the anisotropy is weak. However, the size of such a zone is not large enough to allow nucleation of reverse domains. The presence of substitution clusters associated with the metastability of the RCo5phase has to be considered. The coercivity essentially depends on the dimension and the anisotropy of these clusters which are mainly related to the amount of substitutions necessary to Stabilize the phase.