MAGNETORESISTANCE - A PROBE TO STUDY THE LOCAL MAGNETIC ENVIRONMENT IN AMORPHOUS ALLOYS WITH FERROMAGNETIC AND 'SPIN-GLASS' TRANSITIONS.

An interesting aspect of amorphous materials arises from the fact that because of the high disorder in the systems, the electron mean free path is short. Hence, magnetoresistance as a probe of short length scales can provide information on local anisotropy as well as systematic variations in the local magnetic environment as a function of temperature. The authors measured the transverse and longitudinal magnetoresistance of Fe//1//0Ni//6//5B//1//5Si//1//0, Fe//1//5Ni//6//0P//1//6B//6Al//3, Fe//9//0Zr//1//0, and Fe//9//1Zr//9 amorphous melt spun alloys in applied fields up to 80 kilo-Gauss from 4 K to 250 K. They discuss correlations between the magnetoresistance and bulk magnetization data and comment on the general consequence of these studies towards plausible microscopic descriptions of the 'spin glass'-like regime.