Plutonium’s missing magnetism found Scientists have long thought that plutonium should be
Plutonium’s missing magnetism found Scientists have long thought that plutonium should be magnetic but observing that property experimentally seemed impossible. Now, a neutron scattering study by researchers in the USA has revealed that this electronically complex and unstable heavy metal does indeed display magnetism, but it is in constant flux, hence the difficulties in attempting to observe it since the metal was first produced 75 years ago.Plutonium famously is a fissile material and was first produced in 1940 by Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan at the University of California, Berkeley, by bombarding uranium-238 with deuterons. Not only is it radioactive, but its 5f electrons sit in a state between delocalized and localized and the energy difference between this shell and the 6d shell is very low, which gives rise to anomalous chemical behavior. Theories abound as to why plutonium should have such a complex electronic structure and predict that the metal should have magnetic order.Marc Janoschek and colleagues at Los Alamos and at Oak Ridge national laboratories have detected the ever-changing magnetism of plutonium. Plutonium exists in a state of quantum mechanical superposition, Janoschek explains, in which the electrons are completely localized in one state giving rise to a magnetic moment and at the other extreme are entirely delocalized and no longer associated with the same ion in the bulk.Read more. -- source link
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