Nanomagnetism: A Case History of Nanoscience and Technology

Mark Freeman, University of Alberta and National Institute for Nanotechnology, Edmonton, Canada

his paper overviews the occurrence and study of magnetism on nanometer-length scales, that is, at sizes where the natural unit on a ruler would be one-billionth of a meter. Nanomagnetism has fascinating early origins on planet Earth, and we must first go back a couple billion years to get to the beginning of the story. Then we will quickly make some big jumps forward through time, to get back to the present. The take-home message is this: we are very lucky to be here now with the first chance in billions of years to understand nanomagnetism in detail, using the tools provided by physics. From the perspective of a physicist, magnetism on nanometer-length scales represents a thoroughly developed, specific example of nanoscience and technology. The reasons for this include: 1) Nanomagnets arent just small, they are also different, making them more compelling objects of study for the physicist. 2) Nanomagnets are the first example of a physicsbased nanotechnology to facilitate a >$100 billion annual revenue global industry. 3) Last but not least, a nanomagnetic effect underlying the previous point in the autumn of 2007 became the first nanotechnological development to be recognized by a Nobel Prize in physics.

Fig. 1. (a) Transmission electron micrograph of magnetoaerotactic bacterium Magnetospirilium magneticum. (The TEM image is from Ref. 2.) (b) Photo using demonstration bar magnets to illustrate the magnetic configuration within the chain of magnetosomes.

The Beginnings
The first two billion years or so of nanomagnetism are captured by the transmission electron micrograph of Fig. 1(a), an image of the magnetoaerotactic bacterium Magnetospirillium magneticum.1,2 These bugs
206

grow their own compass needle inside, to passively orient themselves in the Earths magnetic field. The needle works like a magnetic dip meter in an instructional physics lab, and naturally guides the swimming direction toward the mud, where the food is. The magnetoaerotactic name comes about because, unlike its purely magnetotactic brethren, which swim the wrong way if the magnetic field direction is reversed (as in visiting the Southern Hemisphere), MagnetospiTHE PHYSICS TEACHER V ol. 47, April 2009

DOI: 10.1119/1.3098203

rillium magneticum also follows oxygen concentration gradients for navigation. The small structures labeled magnetosome contain (within a protein sheath) single crystals of magnetite, a magnetic iron oxide. These particles may be the first biominerals ever produced by life on Earth.3 Its worth pausing to reflect on this clever magnetic arrangement. Each little particle is a tiny bar magnet on its own, and all the little bar magnets line up endto-end to behave like one bigger bar magnet [Fig. 1(b)]. The long skinny shape of a compass needle helps keep it magnetized. The center-to-center spacing of the particles in Fig. 1(a) averages about 57 nm roughly a million times smaller than the scale of the magnets in Fig. 1(b). Segmenting the needle into discrete particles allows the bacterium to share the magnetosomes with both daughter cells when it divides, passing on the navigation assistance to the next generation. This magnetic design doesnt scale to larger dimensions, however, as discussed below. It is a special property of magnetic nanoparticles that lets it work.

Start

Finish

a) Start Finish

b)

Fig. 2. Screen captures from two computer simulations run using the LLG Micromagnetics Simulator (Ref. 5), showing the initial and final magnetic configurations. (a) For a 100-nm cube the stable magnetic configuration is very nonuniform and highly demagnetized. (b) For a 10-nm cube the stable magnetic configuration is uniform.

Mankind and Magnetism

Making an enormous jump forward in time, the last 5000 years of humanitys experience with magnetism can be summarized as follows. Deposits of magnetite (lodestone) were found and exploited in China about 5000 years ago to make the first compasses. Our name for magnet has its root in the Greek province of Magnesia, where the mineral was first mined in the west. The dramatic action at a distance property of magnets has captivated people from the beginning, but a couple of thousand years more had to pass before we began to see serious theories of the phenomenon. The first theory (as opposed to description) is attributed to Ren Descartes, who suggested that the orientation of iron filings around a bar magnet comes about because these materials contain directional pores through which invisible threads pass and transmit forces.4 The first really big step toward understanding the permanent magnetism embodied in bar magnets came with the discovery of the electron, and in particular the fact that each electron, in addition to having electric charge and mass, is itself a tiny magnetic dipole. Inside materials there are so many electrons in such close proximity that the organization of their
THE PHYSICS TEACHER V ol. 47, April 2009

magnetic moments has to be described according to the rules of quantum mechanics. Another key point is that the organization occurs spontaneously if the material isnt too hot; that is, you dont have to apply a magnetic field from the outside to get the electrons to behave. There are two main flavors of this kind of organization. The best known is ferromagnetism (in honor of iron as the prime example), where many of the neighboring electron moments align in the same direction. If this orientation is mostly preserved throughout a piece of material, we can make a bar magnet or a compass needle. A less well-known, but actually more common, form of the organization has equal numbers of electron moments pointing up and down. The material is then not seen to be magnetized from the outside, but the organization can be detected for example by studying how neutron beams are diffracted by the material. It was for that kind of work that led Clifford Skull, an American physicist from Pittsburgh, and Bertram Brockhouse, a Canadian physicist born in Lethbridge (Alberta, Canada), to share the 1994 Nobel Prize in physics.

Computer Models of Nanomagnets

A computer model can be run in order to illustrate why the magnetosomes have to be so small. Figure 2
207

sets up a simulation for a nickel-iron alloy we often study. Consider a cube of the material 100 nm on a side. In order for the simulation to be reasonably accurate, we break it up into 1000 smaller cells, each of which contain about 100,000 aligned electron moments (that is, within a given smaller cell, all of the electron spins are assumed to always remain parallel to each other, thereby behaving as a single giant spin).5 Each arrow in the image corresponds to the magnetic orientation of one of those cells. In the computer, we can begin with any starting arrangement that we wish. The simplest is to have all the cells parallel, as in a bar magnet [Fig. 2(a), left panel]. When we turn on the clock and let this system develop, however, we find that it is very unstable. It produces other interesting patterns with vortex-like properties that when seen from the outside are now almost completely demagnetized, and would behave as a broken link in the chain of magnetosomes. Figure 2(a), right panel, shows the arrangement after just 100 ps of simulated time (the picosecond is the natural clock unit here, for typical material parameters). If we make the particle small enough, however, we get the opposite behavior. Now we can start with a nonuniform initial state [Fig. 2(b), left panel] and when we start the clock we find that the cells want to flip around until their moments are all parallel [Fig. 2(b), right panel]. Now the bacterium has a big survival advantage! [The choice of particle size in Fig. 2(b) also self-consistently justifies the assumption of uniform alignment within the 10-nm cells of Fig. 2(a)]. This is also where the nanoscience aspect becomes clear: the preferred magnetic configuration of the particle, when simply left to its own devices, changes dramatically when it becomes sufficiently smallwith the relevant size typically being of nanometer dimensions. The phenomenon just illustrated via computer modeling was already known more than 50 years ago, although it couldnt be studied in gory detail back then. One of my favorite papers from that era is a theoretical work on the effect of placing cavities within magnetic nanoparticles (the now-fashionable prefix nano was still far in the future).6 It must have seemed as if research into what we now call nanomagnetism was about to take offbut something else happened instead.
208

Fig. 3. The magnetic Moores law curve, superimposed on a photo of two items of disk hardware separated by about a human generation. (Based on a chart by Ed Grochowski at IBM Almaden.)

The Information Storage Industry

What happened was this: the magnetic hard disk drive for data storage was invented in California. This was a revolutionary new technology, which also began to improve at a very dramatic rate and captured peoples imagination. The background of Fig. 3 shows a photo of a contemporary computer hard drive, opened to show the working mechanism, resting on a much larger hard drive platter from the early 1980s, which stored on the order of 10,000 times less information. In the foreground is a graph showing, on a logarithmic scale, how the density of stored information has increased over the years. Today, roughly 100 million bits of information fit into the same space as one original bit from the mid-1950s. To a large extent, for the past 50 years the majority of activity in magnetics research has been locked to the size scales most relevant to this industry (see scale bar on the right in Fig. 3), returning only in more recent years back to the nanometer range. This graph is the magnetic version of Moores law, the self-fulfilling prophecy from semiconductor technology that forecast the number of transistors on a chip would increase over time in a similar way. The most remarkable thing about this curve is the fact that there have been a couple of moments where the rate of improvement actually increased sharply. These came about from the introduction of new ways
THE PHYSICS TEACHER V ol. 47, April 2009

to read the data off the disks, which naturally becomes very challenging as the bits become very small. The second subtle kink, in 1997, is now legendary because it corresponded to the adoption of a brand-new (from the point of view of technology) nanomagnetic phenomenon known as giant magnetoresistance (GMR), discovered in 1988 and honored with the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics.

Giant Magnetoresistance
In brief, giant magnetoresistance is an effect in which the electrical resistance of a metal film composed of very thin layers alternating between magnetic and nonmagnetic composition depends strongly on whether the magnetic layers have their moments aligned parallel or antiparallel. The reason is that electrons coming out of one layer with their magnetic moments aligned one way encounter more resistance if they enter another layer where their moments want to be aligned the other way. This can make the electrical resistance very sensitive to an applied magnetic field, which controls the orientation of the layers. The layers have to be very thin for this to be effective; in the cartoon of Fig. 4, the little balls represent individual atoms. Since the effect works best with nanometer-thick layers, it can be used in sensors for very tiny magnetic bits. This eliminated a bottleneck in the information storage industry. We tend to be unconscious of the fact that weve already been buying nanomagnetic technology at the electronics commodity store for more than 10 years. The second kink may not look like much, but it was truly disruptive. Companies that could not bring GMR into production soon went under. Applied Magnetics in Santa Barbara, at about 40 years one of the oldest companies in the business, plunged from record profits to bankrupt in just a few years during the latter half of the 1990s. The development of giant magnetoresistance really had legs. It led to intensive consideration of questions such as, what is the effect of the electron magnetic moment scattering on the magnetization itself? It turned out even to be possible to reverse the magnetization direction at the high current densities, which can be achieved in nanocontacts.7 GMR can be seen as the jumping-off point for a massive amount of ongoing research in magnetoelectronics (also known as
THE PHYSICS TEACHER V ol. 47, April 2009

Fig. 4. Giant magnetoresistance cartoon. The green balls indicate atomic layers of iron; the grey balls atomic layers of chromium. From: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/ laureates/2007/phyadv07.pdf.

Fig. 5. Scanning electron microscope image of the air-bearing surface of an early GMR magnetic recording device (the device is built onto a slider that flies only nanometers above the surface of the spinning hard disk). The thin layers at the bottom make up the reader, while the thick middle layer and large block at the top are the two poles of the writer.

spintronics).8 Indeed, GMR itself has already been surpassed and replaced in the technology by tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR).

Magnetism and Microscopy

Reading the data is not the only challenge in improving the performance of disk drives. The electron micrograph (Fig. 5) shows the business end of a readwrite device. The thin layers to the left are a GMR sensor (the reader), and the bulkier structure to the right of that is the writer. Evolving experimental techniques such as stroboscopic microscopy have provided insight into the physical limitations for writing, especially at high speed. Microscopy development is an area where there is still great return on invested effort, for nanoscience and technology. The GMR sensor itself can be viewed as a kind of magnetoresistance microscope. In
209

Fig. 7. The letters A-A-P-T rendered in Times New Monoxide font [medium: carbon monoxide on Cu(111)]. For more information and to typeset your own phrases, see the Times New Monoxide typewriter at www.phys.ualberta. ca\~dfortin\nano. Fig. 6. Ferromagnetic resonance imaging. A thin film magnetic dot vibrates with magnetic oscillations after being hit with a fast pulse of magnetic field. (Snare drum photo used with permission from Jupiter images.)

the case of magnetics, a partial list of evolving techniques might include: magnetic force microscopy; magnetic resonance force microscopy; scanning electron microscopy with polarization analysis; transmission electron microscopy (Lorentz and holographic modes); x-ray photoelectron emission microscopy; and spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy.9 An ultrafast stroboscopic magneto-optical microscope lets us perform an analog of magnetic resonance imaging on small magnets. Figure 6 shows on the right a montage of stroboscopic movie frames from an example wherein a thin-film magnetic dot has been struck with a pulse of magnetic field, causing the magnetization within it to vibratemuch like a drumhead would after being hit by a drum stick (left panel). These are small-angle ferromagnetic resonance oscillations (angular excursions on the order of one milliradian). The same approach can also be used to study large-angle motions, including the ones leading to magnetic switching (and used almost innumerable times per year now around the world to store data). A major goal of this work is to run the problem all the way to the end, that is, to study the statics and dynamics of the magnetization down to the level of the atomic lattice. We cannot yet say whether the conceptual limit of the Moores law curve, magnetic information storage with a bit footprint of just a few atoms, can be realized. (A famous example of nonmagnetic and very slow information storage on this scale is exploited in Fig. 7.) In any case, many past theoretical arguments for a limiting storage density
210

have already gone by the wayside as the industry has continued to create work-arounds. With more than two billion years of nanomagnetism history on Earth already in the bag, the most remarkable aspect has to be the understanding and control that has developed very suddenly over the past century, thanks to physics.
Acknowledgments

I am very grateful for extensive assistance from Lynn Chandler in the preparation of this article, and to AAPT for stimulating it via the wonderful summer meeting in Edmonton in July 2008. It has been great fun to work with all present and former group members and collaborators in this area over the past 15 years, and with the support of NSERC, iCORE, CIFAR, CRC, CFI, the National Institute for Nanotechnology, and the University of Alberta.
References 1. Richard P. Blakemore, Magnetotactic bacteria, Ann. Rev. Microbiol. 36, 217-238 (1982). 2. Arash Komeili, Hojatollah Vali, Terrance J. Beveridge, and Dianne K. Newman, Magnetosome vesicles are present before magnetite formation, and MamA is required for their activation, PNAS 101 (11), 38393844 (2004). 3. Robert E. Kopp and Joseph L. Kirschvink, The identification and biogeochemical interpretation of fossil magnetotactic bacteria, Earth Sci. Rev. 86, 42-61 (2008). 4. Gerrit L.Verschuur, Hidden Attraction: The History and Mystery of Magnetism (Oxford University Press, U.S., 1996). 5. M.R. Scheinfein, LLG Micromagnetics Simulator, available at http://llgmicro.home.mindspring.com/.
THE PHYSICS TEACHER V ol. 47, April 2009

6. William Fuller Brown Jr. and A.H. Morrish, Effect of a cavity on a single-domain magnetic particle, Phys. Rev. 105 (4), 1198-1201 (1957). 7. E.B. Myers, D.C. Ralph, J.A. Katine, R.N. Louie, and R.A Buhrman, Current-induced switching of domains in magnetic multilayer devices, Sci. 285, 867-870 (1999). 8. S.A. Wolf, D.D. Awschalom, R.A. Buhrman, J.M. Daughton, S. von Molnr, M.L. Roukes, A.Y. Chtchelkanova, and D.M. Treger, Spintronics: A spin-based electronics vision for the future, Sci. 294, 1488-1495 (2001). 9. M.R. Freeman and B.C. Choi, Advances in magnetic microscopy, Sci. 294, 1484-1488 (2001). PACS codes: 40.00.00, 80.00.00
Mark Freeman is a professor of physics at the University of Alberta and a research officer at the National Institute for Nanotechnology. www.phys.ualberta.ca/~freeman; mark.freeman@ ualberta.ca

THE PHYSICS TEACHER V ol. 47, April 2009

211