In January with the help of my prominent supervisors, which I have the privilege to work alongside with, we produced ribbons via a melt spinning technique. This method is based on rapid cooling of molten materials leading to quick solidification. There were four ingots prepared with nominal composition of Ni48Mn39.5Sn12.5, Ni48Mn39.5Sn11.5Al1, Ni48Mn39.5Sn10.5Al2, Ni48Mn39.5Sn9.5Al3 denoted as NMS, NMSA, NMSAA, NMSAAA respectively. The subsequently obtained ribbons were XRD and TEM analysed (only the first NMS sample was studied this month due to time constraints). During this task I had the opportunity to familiarize myself with the method utilized for fabrication of thin foils specific for Transmission Electron Microscopy studies. TEM observation showed very interesting results. Amongst them there were the so called tweed contrasts seen in the examined sample indicative of segregation processes. Also it was noticed that the resulting average elemental chemical composition slightly shifted with respect to the staring one. This is in accordance with literature and was reported in a paper by B. Hernando et al. (Journal of Magnetism and Magnetic Materials V. 321 April 2009), which I came across. Nevertheless this interesting finding requires further studies.
The research goes on…