Magnetism. Fundamentals

University Joseph Fourier9780387229676, 9780387230627, 0387229671

Magnetic materials are all around us, and understanding their properties underlies much of today’s engineering efforts. The range of applications in which they are centrally involved includes audio, video and computer technology, tele-communications, automotive sensors, electric motors at all scales, medical imaging, energy supply and transportation, as well as the design of stealthy airplanes.

This book deals with the basic phenomena that govern the magnetic properties of matter, with magnetic materials and with the applications of magnetism in science, technology and medicine.

Although an in-depth understanding of magnetism requires a quantum mechanical approach, a phenomenological description of the mechanisms involved has been deliberately chosen in most chapters in order for the book to be useful to a wide readership. The emphasis is placed, in the part devoted to the atomic aspects of magnetism, on explaining, rather than attempting to calculate, the mechanisms underlying the exchange interaction and magnetocrystalline anisotropy, which lead to magnetic order, hence to useful materials. This theoretical part is placed, in Volume I, between a phenomenological part, introducing magnetic effects at the atomic, mesoscopic and macroscopic levels, and a presentation of magneto-caloric, magneto-elastic, magneto-optical and magneto-transport coupling effects.