Ultrathin platinum films become magnetic when subjected to an electric field
Friday, January 31, 2014 - 10:00
in Physics & Chemistry
Only a few elements in the periodic table are inherently magnetic. Iron is perhaps the best known, but cobalt and nickel also exhibit this type of ferromagnetism. Scientists have recently discovered, however, that gold, silver, platinum, palladium and other transition metals demonstrate magnetic behavior when formed into nanometer-scale structures. Yoshihiro Iwasa, Sunao Shimizu and colleagues from the Emergent Device Research Team at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science have now shown that this nanoscale magnetism in thin films of platinum can be controlled using an externally applied electric field.