Lamellar magnetism and exchange bias in billion-year-old metamorphic titanohematite with nanoscale ilmenite exsolution lamellae - II: exchange-bias at 5 K after field-free cooling of NRM and after cooling in a+5 T field

This is the second of three papers investigating properties of titanohematite-bearing quartzo-feldspathic rocks that create a significant remanent magnetic anomaly in the Modum District, South Norway. The first paper provided initial magnetic results, mineralogical characterization and evidence for the presence of lamellar magnetism. In this paper, knowledge of lamellar magnetic properties is explored through experiments where ilmenite lamellae were magnetized below 57 K, and interact magnetically along interfaces with the titanohematite host. Samples with known NRM directions were placed in specific orientations in an MPMS then cooled in zero field to 5 K, where hysteresis loops were measured in fields up to 5 Tesla. This assured that results were ultimately related to the natural lamellar magnetism produced during cooling similar to 1 billion years ago. In a second set of experiments the same oriented samples, were subjected to a +5 Tesla (T) field then field cooled to 5 K before hysteresis experiments. The first experiments consistently produced asymmetric shifted hysteresis loops with two loop separations, one in a positive field and one in a negative field. Without exception, when the NRM was oriented toward the negative field end of the MPMS, the bimodal loop showed a dominant loop separation in a positive field. By contrast, when the NRM was oriented toward the positive field end of the MPMS, the bimodal loop showed a dominant loop separation in a negative field. Both observations are consistent with antiferromagnetic coupling between the hard magnetization of ilmenite and the more easily shifted lamellar magnetism of the hematite. The bimodal nature of the loops indicates that the NRMs are vector sums of natural lamellar moments, which are oriented both positively and negatively, and that these opposite moments control the orientations of ilmenite magnetizations when cooling through 57 K. Here, extreme exchange biases up to 1.68 T were measured. The second set of experiments produced asymmetric shifted hysteresis loops with one opening always in the negative field. These observations indicate that the +5 T field applied at room temperature rotated the hematite lamellar magnetism in a positive direction, so that upon cooling all the ilmenite lamellae acquired negative magnetic moments, thus causing unimodal negatively shifted loops. Here, the largest exchange bias among the unimodal loops was only 0.7 T. These results will be used in paper III to build a better understanding of lamellar magnetism at the atomic layer scale.