Simultaneous thermal, acoustic, and magnetic emission (AE and ME) measurements during thermally induced martensitic transformation in Ni 2 MnGa single crystals demonstrate that all three types of the above noises display many coincident peaks and the same start and finish temperatures. The amplitude and energy distribution functions for AE and ME avalanches satisfy power-law behavior, corresponding to the symmetry of the martensite. At zero external magnetic field asymmetry in the exponents was obtained: their value was larger for heating than for cooling. Application of constant, external magnetic fields (up to B = 722 mT) leads to the disappearance of the above asymmetry, due to the decrease of the multiplicity of the martensite variants. Time correlations (i.e., the existence of nonhomogeneous temporal processes) within AE as well as ME emission events are demonstrated by deviations from the uncorrelated behavior on probability distributions of waiting times as well as of a sequence of number of events. It is shown that the above functions collapse on universal master curves for cooling and heating as well as for AE and ME noises. The analysis of the existence of temporal correlations between AE and ME events revealed that at short times the acoustic signals show a time delay relative to the magnetic one, due to the time necessary for the propagation of the ultrasound. At intermediate times, as expected, the magnetic signal is delayed, i.e., the magnetic domain rearrangement followed the steps of structural transformation. At much longer times the deviation from an uncorrelated (Poisson-type) behavior is attributed to the nonhomogeneity of the avalanche statistics.

The jerky character of austenite-martensite phase transformation in Ni 2 MnGa single crystals (with 10M martensite structure) has been investigated by thermal cycling using a differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) and by detection of acoustic emissions (AEs) at low cooling and heating rates (0.1 K/min and below). It is illustrated that, besides the low cooling and heating rate, mass and surface roughness are also important parameters in optimizing the best signal/noise ratio in order to obtain individual peaks suitable for statistical analysis. Three types of samples, differing in the twin structure and twin boundary behavior, were investigated with and without surface roughening made by electro-erosion. The statistical analysis, carried out for both (thermal and acoustic) types of signals, provided power-law behavior. In calorimetric measurements the energy exponents, obtained in cooling, were the same within the experimental errors (ε = 1.7 ± 0.2) for the three samples investigated. In acoustic emission experiments the energy and amplitude, α, exponents were determined both for cooling and heating. The exponents for cooling and heating runs are slightly different. They are larger for heating for both α and ε, in accordance with the asymmetric acoustic activity: we observed higher acoustic activity (higher number of hits) during cooling. The effect of the surface roughness is negligible in the exponents (but higher acoustic activity corresponds to higher roughness) and the following values were obtained: ε = 1.5 ± 0.1 and α = 2.1 ± 0.1 for cooling as well as ε = 1.8 ± 0.1 and α = 2.6 ± 0.1 for heating. Our results are in accordance with the results of Gallardo et al. [Phys. Rev. B 81, 174102 (2010)

The hyperfine parameters of iron atoms are studied in iron nanocrystallites prepared by different methods: ball milling of iron powder, partial crystallization of Fe-Zr-B-Cu amorphous ribbons, and vacuum evaporation of Fe-B polycrystalline multilayers. Careful analysis of the spectral contribution of the possible impurities and chemical mixing at interfaces reveals that no specific grain boundary contribution can be separated in the Mössbauer spectra when the grain size is in the 2-10 nm range. The results indicate that excluding chemical effects the hyperfine fields of iron atoms at the bcc interfaces are very close to those in the bulk, and Mössbauer spectra of the iron nanocrystallites studied can be understood without supposing a separate grain boundary phase with very distorted structure or highly reduced density.

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