## 1 Introduction  
The investigation of materials showing an magnetocaloric effect (MCE) has been an important area of research due to its potential application in magnetic refrigeration technology and its fundamental point of view [1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10]. Magnetic refrigeration provides highly efficient and environment-friendly cooling compared to conventional gas compression/expansion techniques [1; 2; 3; 4]. Research in this field generally focused on materials with MCE around room temperature and low-temperature regions. The current focus of the researchers is to investigate the various materials that have MCE near room temperature. Moreover, the technological application examination of the magnetocaloric parameters of a magnetic material is interesting from the fundamental point of view as they confer insight into complex magnetic phases present in the system. In the past, researchers have used magnetocaloric parameters to study the nature of magnetic ordering [7; 8; 9; 10; 11; 12]. In short, a comprehensive investigation of field-dependent MCE can endow helpful insight into the performance of a material in magnetic refrigeration in the actual refrigeration cycle. Instead, such investigations also aim to obtain a deeper understanding of the nature of magnetic-phase transitions and phase coexistence in the material. In practice, the MCE performance is assessed through the change in magnetic entropy in response to an external magnetic field that is significantly controlled by structural changes and equally associated magnetic phase transitions. Intermetallic compounds have been marked by high entropy changes, due to which they secure the highest spot in the quest of finding an excellent MCE material. Intermetallic alloys offer an ideal playground for maneuvering the MCE and other physical properties in binary, ternary, and quaternary systems [8; 9; 12; 13; 14; 15; 16; 17; 18; 19; 20; 21] simply by adjusting the arrangement of constituent metal ions in the crystal structure. In the last few years, various transition metal-based compounds have been explored, which are cost-effective and very good alternatives to rare-earth materials [13; 14; 16; 17; 18; 19; 20; 21; 22; 23; 24; 25]. Lately, iron-based alloys have been suggested as economical alternatives in the field of magnetic cooling [19; 22; 23]. The binary intermetallic compounds Fe\({}_{100-x}\)M\({}_{x}\) (M is 3d or 4d metals) provide a good platform to investigate various properties such as magnetic [26; 27; 28; 29; 30; 23; 26; 23; 24; 23; 25; 26; 27; 28; 29; 31], magnetocaloric [22; 23; 24; 31], electrical [32], magnetoresistance [33; 34], and mechanical [35]. Fe\({}_{100-x}\)M\({}_{x}\) alloys have a cubic structure with bcc (\(\alpha\)-phase) and fcc (\(\gamma\)-phase) crystal structure geometries. In such alloys, most magnetic and related properties are governed by the crystallographic phases. Based on the nature of the structural phase, they showed low and high-temperature magnetic behavior. Various synthesis methods have been reported for preparing such binary alloys [19; 22; 26; 28; 29; 30; 36; 37]. Among them, mechanical alloying through the ball-mill technique has been applied extensively, primarily because of its ability to bypass the phase diagram regularities and hence ease the synthesis of metastable structural phases [19; 36; 38; 39]. Moreover, it could cause the impurity phase fractions or lattice disorders to control the magnetocaloric parameter, the broadness of the magnetic transition, and the disordered-derived distributed exchange interactions [19; 22; 23; 38; 40]. Fe-M alloys have shown soft ferromagnetic behavior with different stoichiometries. This family has demonstrated a significant magnitude of magnetocaloric parameters with low hysteresis losses and tunable Curie temperatures. Fe-based binary alloys with 3d or 4d substituents have shown mixed structural behavior [30; 36], which dictates the magnetic and magnetocaloric properties.