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A comprehensive review is given of recent advances in the study of metastable phases in rare-earth permanent magnets. The relations between the structures of the metastable and equilibrium phases and the transformations from the former to the latter are discussed. The formation of the phases is found to depend on the difference between the symmetries of the metastable and equilibrium phases. The magnetic properties of the metastable-phase rare-earth permanent magnets synthesized by various processes, such as mechanical alloying, mechanical milling, rapid quenching, hydrogenation, disproportionation, desorption and recombination, solid-state reaction, solid-gas reaction, self-flux and sputtering, are compared. The main conclusion of this article is that searching for new metastable phases with high magnetic performance will be one of the most active directions in the research on rare-earth permanent magnets.

Exchange coupling has been realized in textured Nd2Fe14B/α-Fe multilayer films. A Mo spacer layer has proved to be effective for preventing interdiffusion at the interface region between the hard-magnetic Nd16Fe71B13 and the soft-magnetic α-Fe layer in these multilayer films. Anisotropic behavior of the exchange coupling in the films is observed by means of magnetic measurements. Furthermore, the effective critical correlation length is found to exhibit anisotropic behavior, which is smaller in the parallel than in the perpendicular direction at the same temperature. This anisotropic behavior of the multilayer films can be well explained by taking into account the shape anisotropy of the textured grains.

The magnetic properties of 10 nm size Ni͑OH͒ 2 nanoparticles prepared by sol-gel method have been studied. The magnetic moments increase with decreasing temperature in a low applied field, which is due to the spin-frozen-like state at low temperatures, and the metamagnetic transition is not clearly observed even in an applied field of 70 kOe due to the size effect. Furthermore, the transition from paramagnetic to antiferromagnetic in the Ni͑OH͒ 2 nanoparticles occurs at lower temperature ͑22 K͒.