Negative remanent magnetization of fine particles with competing cubic and uniaxial anisotropies

The magnetic properties of noninteracting single-domain particles whose anisotropy is made up of a cubic magnetocrystalline and a uniaxial components were investigated. Various directions of the uniaxial anisotropy were considered and the dependencies of the reduced remanence as a function of the ratio between the two anisotropies were obtained. It was found that for sufficiently strong uniaxial anisotropy and random arrangement of the particle orientations, reduced remanence lower than 0.5 is, in general, an intrinsic property of the system due to the negative remanent magnetization of some of the particles.