Grain size limit for SD hematite

Grain sizes in the range (10^?4 to 10^?1 mm) are common in some rocks. Because thermal and/or chemical remanent magnetization of hematite in this range approaches intensities of single domain (SD) magnetite, careful exploration of this transition, may serve to develop new applications in rock magnetism that relate to magnetic anomaly source identification, and various paleomagnetic and grain size-dependent investigations.Grain size-dependent magnetic behavior of hematite reveals a SD–multidomain (MD) transition at 0.1 mm. This transition is recognized by variation in magnetic coercivity and susceptibility and is related to an anomaly in remanence recovery when cycling through the Morin transition. The coercivity decrease with increasing grain size occurs much more gradually above 0.1 mm than below this value. Magnetic susceptibility of the grains smaller than 0.1 mm has negligible dependence on the amplitude of the applied alternating magnetic field. For the larger grains a new amplitude-dependent susceptibility component is observed. The grain size of 0.1 mm is also associated with loss of most of the remanence when cycling through the Morin transition. This behavior is ascribed to a transition from the metastable SD to the MD magnetic state. The increase in magnetized volume causes the demagnetizing energy to destabilize the SD state, resulting in a transition where the demagnetizing energy is reduced by nucleation of the domain wall for grains larger than 0.1 mm. The 0.1 mm transition has no significant effect on shape of the temperature-dependent coercivity and saturation magnetization.