Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
It makes sense to me intuitively that the crystalline structure in, say, grain-oriented electrical steel would yield good magnetic properties. I am envisioning magnetic field lines guided along by regularly arranged atoms in the grain-oriented steel.
I've learned, however, that amorphous steel can also have good magnetic properties. How is this possible when all the atoms are randomly arranged? Aren't the magnetic field lines going to be all haywire?
Amorphous means positions of atoms are random. But this still allows for aligned magnetic moments. Then for magnetization it does not matter where the atoms are, only that their moments are aligned.
For most magnetically ordered materials, their magnetic exchange strength leads to domain wall width between a few nm and a few um. That is the length over which the magnetization vector changes in these materials.
It is not related to atomic positions. Strucutral grain boundary thicknesses (in crystalline matter) are usually only a few (or even a single) atoms wide.
