Spanish scientists have created the world’s thinnest solid magnet

An international team of researchers led by the Institute of Nanoscience and Materials of Aragon (INMA-CSIC-UNIZAR), a joint institute of the Supreme Council of Scientific Research (CSIC) and the University of Zaragoza (UNIZAR), created An atomically thin solid magnet for the first time in the world.

It is the thinnest magnet that exists and will ever exist, with a specific magnetic direction, relatively high temperature and very difficult to demagnetize. After seven years of research, this result represents clear progress in the cross-cutting areas of magnetism and surface science research, given that this is a goal that has been worked on by various groups of scientists from around the world for over two decades. The results were published in the journal Natural communications

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Fernando BartolomeCSIC researcher at INMA and currently Minister for Education of the United Kingdom and Ireland, and Jorge Lobo Czech Republicalso a scientist from INMA and a leading researcher at the Laboratory of Advanced Microscopy (LMA), are the architects of this achievement: reducing the solid magnet to its minimal expression as part of the current general trend towards miniaturization, which is trying to get elements of ever smaller size, occupying as little space as possible, but without losing its properties.

“We were able to use a combination of iron molecules and atoms to create a network in which the atoms are separated from each other by a fixed distance and have a magnetization direction perpendicular to this network,” explains Lobo. The combination of materials he is talking about is a molecule made from anthracene (three carbon rings) and iron atoms. Thus it turns out lattice (similar to a honeycomb structure) in which iron atoms are arranged at the vertices of hexagons.

As for the hardness of this ultra-thin magnet, it is determined by the difficulty of changing the direction of magnetization. “The field that determines the hardness of a ferromagnetic material is the intensity of the magnetic field that must be applied to that material to reverse its magnetization. This indicates how hard or soft it is. And the more difficult it is to change the direction of magnetization, the more difficult it is,” Lobo emphasizes. According to Bartholomew: “The hardness of this atomically thin magnet is similar to that of neodymium magnets.

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This advance in basic science has potential practical applications in any technological device. where it is necessary to turn on a magnetic field, for example, in a computer’s RAM or transistor. “It would be very useful to miniaturize things even further due to their small size. We must take into account that in this magnet the iron atoms are separated by a distance of one nanometer, that is, one millionth of a millimeter,” Lobo illustrates.

The work was developed by an international team led by INMA in collaboration with the UNIZAR Advanced Microscopy Laboratory (LMA), administratively linked to INMA, the ALBA synchrotron and the UNIZAR UPS. Also contributing to the study on behalf of INMA were Leire Hernandez Lopez, David Serrate (also director of LMA’s SPM department), and newly registered investigator Mikhail M. Otrokov.

Similarly, Ignacio Piquero Sulaica (Technical University of Munich) worked on the project; Adriana Candia (Litoral Institute of Physics, Argentina); Pierluigi Gargiani and Manuel Valvidares, ALBA synchrotron scientists; Fernando Delgado (University of La Laguna); Jorge Cerda (ICMM Madrid); and Andrés Arnau (University of the Basque Country).