  The ferrimagnetic spin-1/2 chain composed of alternating Ising and Heisenberg
spins in an arbitrarily oriented magnetic field is exactly solved using the
spin-rotation transformation and the transfer-matrix method. It is shown that
the low-temperature magnetization process depends basically on a spatial
orientation of the magnetic field. A sharp stepwise magnetization curve with a
marked intermediate plateau, which emerges for the magnetic field applied along
the easy-axis direction of the Ising spins, becomes smoother and the
intermediate plateau shrinks if the external field is tilted from the easy-axis
direction. The magnetization curve of a polycrystalline system is also
calculated by performing powder averaging of the derived magnetization formula.
The proposed spin-chain model brings an insight into high-field magnetization
data of 3d-4f bimetallic polymeric compound Dy(NO_3)(DMSO)_2Cu(opba)(DMSO)_2,
which provides an interesting experimental realization of the ferrimagnetic
chain composed of two different but regularly alternating spin-1/2 magnetic
ions Dy^{3+} and Cu^{2+} that are reasonably approximated by the notion of
Ising and Heisenberg spins, respectively.
