The rate of magnetization change (magnetic after effect) which occurs after
the magnetic field applied to a magnetic material is switched suddenly to
a new value, is generally assumed to increase when the temperature is incre
ased. Deviation from this temperature behavior, which has been observed in
several cases, has been ascribed to changes in pertinent magnetic propertie
s, such as magnetocrystalline anisotropy, activation volume, coercive field
, etc., with temperature. We report here on the magnetic after effect tempe
rature dependence of a magnetic recording material with magnetic properties
that change very little with temperature over a wide temperature range but
which, nevertheless, deviates considerably from a monotonic increase in de
cay rate with increasing temperature. We postulate that this behavior is ex
plained by replacing the Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics by the Bose-Einstein
statistics appropriate for the magnon energy distribution. (C) 2000 America
n Institute of Physics. [S0021-8979(00)83608-7].