Talk:Antiferromagnetism

Minor edits

antiferromagnetic metals are used in the watch industry to make the mechanical watches resistent to the magnetic field in the surroundings...

Magnetic electrons ?! I'm changing ot back to electrons. Vorpal Blade^{snicker-snack} 10:30, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

"asperomagnetic" should be mentioned/explained too. —DIV (128.250.80.15 (talk) 00:18, 3 April 2008 (UTC))

Redundancy

A large part of the article is spent discussing geometric frustration, which already has a rather complete article of its own. I'll do my best to clean it up, but perhaps more bold measures are needed. JaredAllred (talk) 20:31, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

unclear

This article does little or nothing to either define antiferromagnetism or distinguish it from paramagnetism, ferrimagnetism and dimagnetism. The introduction immediately jumps into the mechanism of the effect without ever defining it or even explaining the behavior in a cogent way. The mechanism of the effect should be delayed until after the introduction, rather than be the introduction. --ssd (talk) 02:28, 1 October 2011 (UTC)

• you are right but physicists in general do not bother about how to measure an effect and how to distinguish various types by experiment. is it really that hard to present a plot of magnetic susceptibility and temperature with all different types of magnetism? V8rik (talk) 17:25, 17 October 2011 (UTC)
  • The primary thing is the magnetic ordering. A figure like File:反強磁性の磁化率の温度依存性.PNG shows the susceptibility, but that is not the way to understanding. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 17:52, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

• This article is still the same unclear and still does not answer the question asked by Ssd. It doesn't even mention something as simple as the effect of antiferromagnetisom! Is it the opposite of ferromagnetism? Does an antiferromagnet repel iron or what? 84.0.34.189 (talk) 09:53, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

• I came here looking to determine quite plainly if Antiferromagnetism means the material is NOT attracted to magnets as one my infer from the "anti" in the name. I was left unsure after reading this. Comparisons to ferromagnetism and ferrimagnetism left me even more unsure. The Ferromagnetism page's first sentence clearly defines it as the basic mechanism by which certain materials are attracted to magnets. As one could be expected to infer from the name that Antiferromagnetism is not attracted to magnets, this page should clearly say that, or clarify this position. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.100.121.78 (talk) 02:08, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

So, um. I know the article explains this, but I'm no magnetics expert, and frankly, I don't care about the magnetic moment of individual atoms. I came to this page to find out just what this meant on the macro scale: are these materials attracted to magnets? Repelled by? Do they draw magnetic field in, repulse them, ignore them? All I got from the lead section on the page is "atoms do magnetic stuff." 184.96.163.36 (talk) 08:44, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

I agree. The Britannica article on this topic is much more understandable to the layperson. 69.22.242.15 (talk) 13:33, 23 December 2016 (UTC)

This isn't the first or the last article in our beloved Wikipedia (completely honest remark) that doesn't make it too easy for the layperson. From what I figured, antiferomagnetic materials don't do essentially anything in the antiferomagnetic phase -they neither attract or push other magnetic material, below a certain temperature, and then they act simply as paramagnetic.2A02:587:4508:2C00:688F:C34C:D0FC:9449 (talk) 03:35, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

Assessment comment

The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Antiferromagnetism/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.

This article and others on magnetics may be about physics, but that's no reason to make them incomprehensible (and useless) to lay people. For example, is an antiferromagnetic substance magnetic or not? Will it pick up a nail?...Repel one? If I had a lump of antiferromagnetic substance, how would I know? ..or is this property only interesting to chemists? What are typical antiferromagnetic materials? A nail? Hematite? Aluminum? Where do they come from? Again, this critique applies to the other magnetic properties too. --Doug

Last edited at 15:53, 12 June 2008 (UTC). Substituted at 08:00, 29 April 2016 (UTC)

Geometric Frustration

Can you further define 'ground state' please? It sounds like any state here not all of the spins are aligned. 162.207.203.26 (talk) 16:44, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

This is another "written for those already in the know" articles.

Don't confuse knowing all about something with the ability to explain it to somebody, those are two entirely different things. The author needs to back up a bit and remember what it was like being 16 years old, and then RE-explain things again.

I'm a chemist, and to become a chemist, I had to have physics, too. If I can't understand what is presented in this article, then a high school student can't, either.

C'mon! Wikipedia is not for those who already have a working knowledge of the subject! Linstrum (talk) 03:27, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

False image

To MadeOfAtoms

The image is not helpful because it is false. In an antiferromagnetic material, spins are aligned in opposite directions only for transverse neighbors, not for longitudinal ones. Learn the basics. See for example the little film : Magnetic orders : comparison between ferro, antiferro and ferrimagnetism, on the same page. TD (talk) 10:46, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

There are multiple ways to order antiferromagnetically. The figure does show antiferromagnetic ordering with wavevector Q=(pi/a,pi/a). This is the natural ordering in the case where the interaction energy between neighbouring spins is minimized when the spins are antiparallel and there are no other energies to consider. The transverse ordering Q=(pi/a,0) would have higher energy, since the interaction energy is maximal in the y-direction. Jähmefyysikko (talk) 11:23, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

Can you give me an example of magnetic material with the order described on this image ? TD (talk) 11:28, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

I suppose this is my mistake. There are others kinds of antiferromagnetic ordering than the one I knew. But in 2D, this image is very counterintuitive, and not typical of antiferromagnetic materials, isn't it ? In 3D, it is more subtle.TD (talk) 11:43, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

It occurs in cuprates at least, and is also the ground state of antiferromagnetic square lattice Ising model. What makes it counterintuitive? Each pair of nearest neighbours is in antiparallel configuration. Jähmefyysikko (talk) 12:09, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your answer. The figure is counterintuitive because a north magnetic pole repels a north magnetic pole. From a pedagogical point of view, this order seemed wrong, but I'm not an expert in the field. When I play with toy magnets, the other antiferromagnetic order appears naturally. TD (talk) 12:19, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

It is a good point. I'd say your intuition fails because here the interaction between the spins is dominated by quantum mechanical short-range interaction, not the electromagnetic interaction. In fact, in the simplest models the magnetic field is neglected completely. Jähmefyysikko (talk) 12:29, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for your kind and enlightening answer. TD (talk) 12:39, 29 July 2023 (UTC)