This thesis presents experimental results on strongly interacting γ-Fe2O3 magnetic nanoparticles and their collective properties. The main findings are that very dense randomly packed (≈60%) γ-Fe2O3 nanoparticles form a replica of a spin glass. The magnetic properties of the nanoparticle system are in most regards the same as those of an atomic spin glass. The system is therefore proposed as a model superspin glass. In superspin glasses the interacting building blocks that form the collective state are single domain nanoparticles, superspins with a magnetic moment of about 10000 μB, which can be compared to the atomic magnetic moment in spin glasses of approximately 1 μB. It was found that the relaxation time of the individual nanoparticles impacts the collective properties and governs the superspin dimensionality. Several dense compacts, each prepared with nanoparticles of a specific size, with diameters 6, 8, 9 and 11.5 nm, were studied. All the studied compacts were found to form a superspin glass state. Non-interacting reference samples, consisting of the same particles but coated with a silica shell, were synthesized to determine the single particle magnetic properties. It was also found that the effects of the nanoparticle size distribution, which lead to a variation of the magnetic properties, can be mitigated by having strong enough interparticle interactions. The majority of the work was carried out using SQUID magnetometry.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-319717 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Andersson, Mikael Svante |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Fasta tillståndets fysik, Uppsala |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Science and Technology, 1651-6214 ; 1505 |
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