New insights into defects and magnetic interactions inducing lattice disordering in CoFeCrAl.

Atomic scale understanding of defect induced magnetic interactions resulting in lattice disordering has been deduced in a detailed manner for the first time in CoFeCrAl based on Mössbauer spectroscopic studies and compared with the results obtained in CoFeCrAl and CoFeAl. An interesting linear correlation between valence electron concentration and the mean hyperfine fields at Fe sites in CoFeAl based compounds has been deduced which is observed to exhibit different slopes with the substitution of Cr. This study elucidates an important role of the manifestation of the magnetic interactions especially between Fe, Co and Cr atoms leading to significant changes in the concentration and specific types of defects selectively produced in CoFeCrAl as compared with that of CoFeCrAl subjected to similar non-equilibrium treatments in this study.