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Condensed-matter physics

The magnetic turnabout

Nature volume 399, pages 21–22 (1999)Cite this article

The ability of certain pieces of rock to attract or repulse each other was discovered about 25 centuries ago by a Greek shepherd whose name was Magnes. Since that time, magnetic properties of materials have fascinated humankind, and quite a few types of magnets have been characterized, synthesized or manufactured. In Physical Review Letters, Hashimoto and co-workers1 report a unique magnet that reverses magnetization not just once, but twice, as the temperature changes. A simple theoretical approach led to the design and synthesis of this unusual magnet, which is a Prussian blue material incorporating four different metal ions.

A magnet may be defined as a material exhibiting a spontaneous magnetization (that is, it remains magnetized even when there is zero external magnetic field) below a certain critical temperature, T c. Some metals, metallic alloys and even molecule-based compounds such as the metallic Prussian blue analogues, behave in this way. The two main kinds of magnets are ferromagnets and ferrimagnets. In ferromagnets, such as iron, interactions between local magnetic dipoles favour a state in which these dipoles align along the same direction, and long-range magnetic ordering occurs at T c. The spontaneous magnetization is zero above T c, where thermal motion overwhelms any magnetic alignment, then progressively increases as the temperature is lowered down to absolute zero. The spontaneous magnetization at 0 K corresponds to the perfect alignment of the local magnetic dipoles.

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Figure 1: Temperature dependence of the spontaneous magnetization for a ferrimagnet with two sub-lattices.
Figure 2: Idealized structure of the Prussian-blue-like phases designed by Hashimoto and colleagues1.

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  1. Olivier Kahn is in the Laboratoire des Sciences Molculaires, Institut de Chimie de la Matire Condense de Bordeaux (ICMCB), 33608, Pessac, France

    Olivier Kahn

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Kahn, O. The magnetic turnabout. Nature 399, 21–22 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/19862

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