Researchers from the Institute of Nanoscience and Materials of Aragon (INMA), a joint institute of the University of Zaragoza and the CSIC, have led an international team that has achieved a significant advancement in the field of miniaturization and magnetism. These scientists have created a hard magnet with atomic thickness, marking a milestone worldwide. This new magnet is the thinnest that exists and could ever exist, maintaining a well-defined magnetic direction, a relatively high operating temperature, and a high resistance to demagnetization.
This advancement has been achieved after seven years of research and represents a significant progress in the field of magnetism and surface science, being a goal sought after by the scientific community for over two decades. According to Jorge Lobo Checa, one of the researchers at INMA and the Advanced Microscopy Laboratory (LMA) of the University of Zaragoza, the achievement has been reached through a combination of iron molecules and atoms, forming a network with atoms separated at a fixed distance and with a magnetization direction perpendicular to this network.
The material used is a molecule derived from anthracene (composed of three carbon rings) and iron atoms, creating a structure similar to a honeycomb where the iron atoms are positioned at the vertices of the hexagons. The hardness of the magnet is comparable to that of neodymium magnets, whose resistance to demagnetization is well known. Fernando Bartolomé, another author and researcher at the CSIC in INMA, points out the similarity in hardness of this new magnet with neodymium magnets, emphasizing the magnitude of the achievement.
From a practical perspective, this development in basic science opens up possibilities for its application in various technological devices that require incorporating a magnetic field, such as computer RAM memories or transistors. Lobo concludes that this magnet will be very useful to continue with the trend of miniaturization in technology, given its extremely small size and the distance between the iron atoms, which is just one nanometer, equivalent to one millionth of a millimeter.
This work has been published in the scientific journal “Nature Communications” and has had the collaboration of several researchers from INMA, as well as scientists from international and national institutions, including Ignacio Piquero Zulaica (Technical University of Munich), Adriana Candia (Institute of Physics of the Coast, Argentina), Pierluigi Gargiani and Manuel Valvidares (ALBA synchrotron), Fernando Delgado (University of La Laguna), Jorge Cerdá (ICMM in Madrid), and Andrés Arnau (University of the Basque Country).
via: MiMub in Spanish
