Direct chemical synthesis of L1(0)-FePtAu nanoparticles with high coercivity

We report a facile synthesis of hard magnetic L1(0)-FePtAu nanoparticles by coreduction of Fe(acac)(3), Pt(acac)(2) (acac = acetylacetonate) and gold acetate in oleylamine. In the current reaction condition, NP sizes are controlled to be 5.5 to 11.0 nm by changing the amount of Au doping. When the Au composition in the NPs is higher than 14%, the hard magnetic NPs are directly obtained without any annealing. The highest coercivity of 12.15 kOe at room temperature could be achieved for the NPs with 32% Au doping, which is much higher than the coercivities reported by the previous studies on solution-synthesized FePt nanoparticles. The reported one-pot synthesis of L1(0)-FePtAu NPs may help to build superstrong magnets for magnetic or data-storage applications.