Magnetic materials are all around us, and understanding their properties underlies much modern-day engineering efforts. The range of applications in which they are centrally involved includes audio, video and computer technology, telecommunications, 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. It is the collective work of 21 scientists, most of them from Laboratoire Louis Neel du CNRS in Grenoble, France. The original version, in French, was edited by Etienne du Tremolet de Lacheisserie, and published in 1999. This version involves, beyond the translation, many corrections and complements. 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: Fundamentals , 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. Volume II: Materials and Applications , dedicated to magnetic materials and applications of magnetism, deals with permanent magnet (hard) materials, magnetically soft materials for low-frequency applications, then for high-frequency electronics, magnetostrictive materials, superconductors, magnetic-thin films and multilayers and ferrofluids. A chapter is dedicated to magnetic recording. The role of magnetism in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and in the earth and the life sciences, is discussed. Finally, a chapter deals with instrumentation for magnetic measurements. Appendices provide tables of magnetic properties, unit conversions, useful formulas and some figures on the economic place of magnetic materials. This book is meant for students at the undergraduate and graduate levels in physics and engineering, and for practicing engineers and scientists. Most chapters include exercises with solutions.
