Carbon in the News Again
Kirt's Cogitations™ #75

RF Cafe University"Factoids," "Kirt's Cogitations," and "Tech Topics Smorgasbord" are all manifestations of my ranting on various subjects relevant (usually) to the overall RF Cafe theme. All may be accessed on these pages:

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Carbon in the News Again

Magnetic carbon has been reported by experimenter Tatiana Makarova, a Russian scientist working in Sweden. The third form of carbon, buckyballs, the soccerball-shaped structures containing 60 carbon atoms created in laboratories, exhibit magnetic properties when compressed at a million lbs/in2 at a temperature of 1,300 ° F. Only iron, cobalt, nickel and gadolinium, are naturally ferromagnetic at room temperature, which means they can be permanently magnetized through exposure to a magnetic field. The complicated proof of existence for these strange non-metallic magnets, involving quantum mechanics, the Pauli exclusion principle and Heisenberg theory, is left to the reader as an exercise.