Stress tunable properties of ferromagnetic microwires and their multifunctional composites.

We report the results of a systematic study on stress tunable absorption of glass-coated amorphous Co68.7Fe4Ni1B13Si11Mo2.3 microwires and their composites. The magnetic microwires possess good stress-impedance properties and yield a stress dependence of absorption at gigahertz frequencies. The stress compensates the reverse effect of magnetic field on absorption. There exist strong stress dependences of the effective permittivity and transmission parameters. Composite failure due to the wire damage results in a dramatic change of the sign and magnitude of effective permittivity. The double peak is identified in the stress dependence of field tunability, in contrast to the single peak for the magnetic field tunability. All these results indicate that the present composites are very promising for detecting the ambient stress levels and interrogating the structural integrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]