Effect of low temperature annealing on magneto-caloric effect of Ni-Mn-Sn-Al ferromagnetic shape memory alloy

We studied the effect of low temperature annealing on the atomic ordering and consequent changes in the magnetization and magnetocaloric effect of the sample. The annealing at lower temperatures initially decreased the magnetization and magnetocaloric effect in the sample, but at higher annealing temperatures both increased. The changes in magnetization and magnetocaloric effect arise from the change in atomic ordering. We have shown that post quenching heat treatment offers easy way of optimizing the alloy for magnetocaloric effect. In order to verify that there was no overestimation in the measurement of magnetocaloric effect we also performed an infield calorimetric measurements and compared them with those from the magnetization measurements. We did not find remarkable difference between them.