Nanoparticles' Magnetic Behavior Defies Accepted Physics Laws

May 19, 2005

This is an informational posting, not a Brookhaven press release.

A collaboration that includes a scientist from Brookhaven Lab has discovered that a class of magnetic nanostructured materials - tiny magnetic particles of about a billionth of a meter in diameter - display behavior that defies accepted, conventional laws of physics and backs up a well-known theory.

Brookhaven physicist Richard Watson and his colleagues followed the magnetic behavior of the particles down to very low temperatures, and noticed an unexpected surge in the magnetism. This finding reinforces the "Bose-Einstein condensation theory," which predicts that at very low temperatures atoms can become indistinguishable from one another, forming a new state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.

For more information on this work, see press releases put out by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and The George Washington University.

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