Correlation between Hall effect, structural relaxation and magnetoelastic coupling in Fe81B13Si4C2 amorphous alloy

The expected high positive value of the extraordinary Hall coefficient R-s in a ferromagnetic alloy was confirmed in the amorphous system Fe81B13Si4C2. At the same time the increase of R-s produced by the thermal structural relaxation was experimentally verified by means of Hall potential measurements in Fe81B13Si4C2 sheets after isothermal annealing in vacuum at increasing temperatures. Moreover, a direct relation between magnetoelasticity and Hall conduction mechanism was demonstrated by means of the effect of a tensile stress sigma on the spontaneous Hall coefficient. It was shown that R-s has an appreciable increase with sigma. By this result one deduces that Hall effect can be useful to measure local axial stresses. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.