Organic magnetism finally demystified
In the January issue of Physics World, Kazuyoshi Tanaka of the Department of Molecular Engineering, Kyoto University, Japan, describes how Bakhyt Narymbetov of the Institute for Molecular Science in O...
Louis Néel and Lochlainn O’Raifeartaigh
Louis Néel was born in Lyons in 1904 and dedicated his career to the study of magnetism. In 1932 he discovered antiferromagnetism – a form of magnetism in which the ‘spins’ on n...
Magnetism’s standard model gets a facelift
The standard model – developed by Pierre Weiss in 1907 – treats paramagnets as systems of non-interacting magnetic dipoles. The theory successfully describes the behaviour of paramagnets &...
Magnetic media: faster and smaller
Conventional magnetic recording works by changing the magnetisation states of different domains. An in-plane applied magnetic field takes a few nanoseconds to ‘switch’ the domain state. Bu...
Magnets help tell left from right
Like these so-called chiral molecules, circularly polarized light also comes in right and left-handed varieties, and can be used to produce an excess of one type of molecule. However, circularly polar...
Imaging antiferromagnets at the atomic scale
S Heinze and co-workers from the University of Hamburg and X Nie and colleagues from the Forschungszentrum Jülich have used “spin-polarized scanning tunelling microscopy” to image an ...
Hendrik Casimir and John Ward
Hendrik Brugt Gerhard Casimir was born in the Hague in the Netherlands in 1909 and received his PhD from the University of Leiden in 1931. After working with Bohr in Copenhagen and Pauli in Zurich, he...
Magnetism researchers win Agilent prize
Van der Laan, Carra and Schütz-Gmeineder share the prize for their work on X-ray magnetic dichroism, a technique in which circularly polarized X-rays are used to study magnetic structures. By mea...
Magnetic microchips to process information
The number of transistors on a silicon chip has doubled every 18 months, but many observers believe that semiconductor technology will reach its limit in a decade or so. This has prompted the developm...
Organic magnets
The material – 1,3,5-trithia-2,4,6-triazapentalenyl (TTTA) – is non-magnetic at very low temperatures. The paramagnetic effect is strong at room temperature, but as the compound is cooled,...
