Making ferromagnets stronger by adding non-magnetic elementsResearchers at the U.S. Department of En

Making ferromagnets stronger by adding non-magnetic elementsResearchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory discovered that they could functionalize magnetic materials through a thoroughly unlikely method, by adding amounts of the virtually non-magnetic element scandium to a gadolinium-germanium alloy.It was so unlikely they called it a “counterintuitive experimental finding” in their published work on the research.“People don’t talk much about scandium when they are talking magnetism, because there has not been much reason to,” said Yaroslav Mudryk, an Associate Scientist at Ames Laboratory. “It’s rare, expensive, and displays virtually no magnetism.”“Conventional wisdom says if you take compound A and compound B and combine them together, most commonly you get some combination of the properties of each. In the case of the addition of scandium to gadolinium, however, we observed an abrupt anomaly.”Years of research exploring the properties of magnetocaloric materials, relating back to the discovery of the giant magnetocaloric effect in rare earth alloys in 1997 by Vitalij Pecharsky and the late Karl Gschneidner, Jr., laid the groundwork for computational theory to begin “hunting” for hidden properties in magnetic rare-earth compounds that could be discovered by introducing small amounts of other elements, altering the electronic structure of known materials.Read more. -- source link

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