Ultra-soft, liquid magnetic droplets could vault technology forward

Nanowerk  July 18, 2019 Solid ferromagnetic materials are rigid in shape and cannot be reconfigured. Ferrofluids, although reconfigurable, are paramagnetic at room temperature and lose their magnetization when the applied magnetic field is removed. An international team of researchers (USA – Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, UMass Amherst, China, Japan) shows a reversible paramagnetic-to-ferromagnetic transformation of ferrofluid droplets by the jamming of a monolayer of magnetic nanoparticles assembled at the water-oil interface. The ferromagnetic liquid droplets exhibit a finite coercivity and remnant magnetization, they can be easily reconfigured into different shapes while preserving the magnetic properties of […]