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Despite the growing interest in the field of ultracold chemistry, exper — Magnetism

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"Despite the growing interest in the field of ultracold chemistry, experimental progress has been hampered by a lack of appropriate methods to trap and cool molecules. Laser cooling, while very successful, is limited to a small number of atoms in the Periodic Table because few atoms and no molecules have closed cycling transitions. The main methods to produce cold molecules of chemical interest can be divided into two groups. Buffer gas cooling relies on collisions with cold helium in a dilution refrigerator to cool paramagnetic molecules and trap them in a magnetic trap. Super-sonic expansion is used by other methods to precool the molecules. The resulting cold molecular beams have been slowed and trapped in some experiments by interactions with pulsed electric fields Stark decelerator, by interactions with pulsed optical fields, by spinning the nozzle, and by billiardlike collisions. Finally, laser-cooled alkali-metal atoms are used to produce cold molecules via photoassociation. None of these methods have, to date, achieved the phase space densities required to observe reaction dynamics at ultracold temperatures. We recently demonstrated a general method to stop and eventually trap paramagnetic atoms. Our method is based on the interaction of a paramagnetic particle with pulsed magnetic fields. It operates in analogy with the Stark decelerator by reducing the kinetic energy of a para-magnetic atom passing through a series of pulsed electro-magnetic coils. The amount of kinetic energy removed by each stage is equal to the Zeeman energy shift that the atom experiences at the time the fields are switched off."
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Magnetism
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Magnetism is the class of physical attributes that occur through a magnetic field, which allows objects to attract or repel each other. Because both electric currents and magnetic moments of elementary particles give rise to a magnetic field, magnetism is one of two aspects of electromagnetism.

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"The magnetism as exhibited in iron is an isolated phenomenon in nature. What it is that makes this metal behave so radically different from all other materials in this respect has not yet been ascertained, though many theories have been suggested. As regards magnetism, the molecules of the various bodies behave like hollow beams partly filled with a heavy fluid and balanced in the middle in the manner of a see-saw. Evidently some disturbing influence exists in nature which causes each molecule, like such a beam, to tilt either one or the other way. If the molecules are tilted one way, the body is magnetic; if they are tilted the other way, the body is non-magnetic; but both positions are stable, as they would be in the case of the hollow beam, owing to the rush of the fluid to the lower end. Now, the wonderful thing is that the molecules of all known bodies went one way, while those of iron went the other way. This metal, it would seem, has an origin entirely different from that of the rest of the globe. It is highly improbable that we shall discover some other and cheaper material which will equal or surpass iron in magnetic qualities."
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"Phonons are displacements of atoms around their rest positions in a crystalline solid. They carry sound and heat, but are not classically associated with magnetism. Here, we show that phonons are, in fact, sensitive to magnetic fields, even in diamagnetic materials. We do so by demonstrating experimentally that acoustic phonons in a diamagnetic semiconductor (InSb) scatter more strongly from one another when a magnetic field is applied. We attribute this observation to the magnetic-field sensitivity of the anharmonicity of the interatomic bonds that govern the probability of phonon-phonon interactions."
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Magnetism