The giant anisotropic magnetocaloric effect in DyAl2

We report on calculations of the anisotropic magnetocaloric effect in DyAl2 using a model Hamiltonian including crystalline electrical field effects. The anisotropic effect is produced by the rotation of a constant magnetic field from the easy to a hard magnetic direction in the crystal and is enhanced by the first order nature of the field induced spin reorientation transition. The calculated results indicate that for a field with modulus of 2 T rotating from a hard to the easy direction, the isothermal magnetic entropy (Delta S-iso) and adiabatic temperature (Delta T-ad) changes present peak values higher than 60% the ones observed in the usual process, in which the field direction is kept constant and the modulus of the field is varied. (c) 2008 American Institute of Physics. [DOI: 10.1063/1.3009974]