Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 February 2011
The influence of grain boundaries on the magnetic properties of nanocrystalline nickel, in particular the ∑ = 3 and ∑ = 5 special grain boundaries and the extreme case of a purely amorphous sample, has been investigated. Our calculations reveal that the magnetic moment is rather insensitive to the structural disorder varying by at most 15 %. These results correlate extremely well with the recent observation in electrodeposited nickel that the magnetic moment depends very little on grain size, down to about 10 nm.