Effect of Tb and Al substitution within the rare earth and cobalt sublattices on magnetothermal properties of Dy0.5Ho0.5Co2

Abstract The effect of Tb and Al substitution within the rare earth and cobalt sublattices on structural and magnetothermal properties of Dy 0.5 Ho 0.5 Co 2 has been studied. Multicomponent Laves phase alloys Tb x (Dy 0.5 Ho 0.5 ) 1− x Co 2− y Al y ( x  = 0, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5; y  = 0, 0.25) synthesized using high-purity metals have been studied using X-ray diffraction analysis, heat capacity and magnetocaloric measurements. Dy 0.5 Ho 0.5 Co 2 has a first order phase transition at the Curie temperature T C  ≈ 110 K. Both Tb and Al substitution leads to increase of the T C . The increasing Tb content leads to the decreases slightly the MCE and all the transitions near the Curie temperature are of the first order. As for the Al-containing compounds, MCE measurements show that the phase transition type changes from the first to the second-order. The advantage of Tb x (Dy 0.5 Ho 0.5 ) 1− x Co 1.75 Al 0.25 as compared with Al-free alloys is ‘table-like’ behavior of MCE.