As a tribute to the scientific work of Professor Gareth Thomas in the field of structure-property relationships this paper delineates a new possibility of Lorentz transmission electron microscopy (LTEM) to study the magnetic properties of soft magnetic films. We show that in contrast to the traditional point of view, not only does the direction of the magnetization vector in nano-crystalline films make a correlated small-angle wiggling, but also the magnitude of the magnetization modulus fluctuates. This fluctuation produces a rapid modulation in the LTEM image. A novel analysis of the ripple structure in nano-crystalline Fe-Zr-N film corresponds to an amplitude of the transversal component of the magnetization ΔMy of 23 mT and a longitudinal fluctuation of the magnetization of the order of ΔMx = 30 mT. The nano-crystalline (Fe99Zr1)1−xNx films have been prepared by DC magnetron reactive sputtering with a thickness between 50 and 1000 nm. The grain size decreased monotonically with N content from typically 100 nm in the case of N-free films to less than 10 nm for films containing 8 at%. The specimens were examined with a JEOL 2010F 200 kV transmission electron microscope equipped with a post column energy filter (GIF 2000 Gatan Imaging Filter). For holography, the microscope is mounted with a biprism (JEOL biprism with a 0.6 μm diameter platinum wire).

A possibility to manipulate the microstructure of cold rolled (down to less than 1% of the initial thickness) Fe94Ni4Ti2 and Fe93Ni4 Cr3 foils via inter-phase cycling by nitriding and de-nitriding is investigated. The grains in the as-rolled material had a dominating (001)[110] texture and contained a complicated internal nanostructure due to a dislocation network. The interphase cycling α↔γ'-Fe4N and α↔ε-FexN (x∼3) was investigated as a tool to change or destroy the texture. We observed that the α↔γ'-Fe4N phase transformations weaken but do not erase the texture. A stronger reduction of the texture was obtained in the α↔ε-cycling, where grains with a new orientation appear in XRD scans. During the α↔γ' phase transformation a lamella structure is formed which is coarsening with the number of cycles. It was found that the rates of the α↔γ' and α↔ε interphase transitions were slowing down with the number of cycles. The observation is explained by an increase of kinetic barriers while removing/transforming the rolling-induced defects during the cycling.