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,...
Century old mystery solved
Invar has a face-centred cubic structure and is composed of about 65% iron and 35% nickel. In addition to its anomalously low thermal expansion, the alloy also has unusual elastic, thermal and magneti...
Bubble breakthrough for magnets
Fukumura and colleagues used a scanning Hall probe microscope to study the formation of the bubbles. The compound that they studied is unusual in that its magnetic structure changes markedly with temp...
Quantum physics breakthrough wins Nobel Prize
Two of the physicists, Horst L. Störmer from Columbia University, New York, and Daniel C. Tsui, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, discovered the effect – called the fractional qu...
Magnetic superglue promotes superconductivity
The Cambridge team studied two heavy fermion compounds: CeIn3 and CePd2Si2. Heavy fermion compounds are materials in which the conduction electrons acquire masses hundreds of times those of free elect...
Tera-byte disk drives
The device works by storing the data as regions of electric charge. The charge is trapped within a thin dielectric layer coated onto a conducting platter. The hard drive reads and writes data using fi...
Magnetic heat engines
Magnetic heat engines have been known about since 1889, but the success of gas engines has largely prevented research into this technology. Magnetic engines work by converting heat directly into elect...
Glass floppy disks?
Aluminium alloys are widely used as a substrate in magnetic disks, but the demand for higher storage and faster access times require better materials. A replacement material would need to offer a thin...
