Rust shines in new light

摘要

Electrical cars, wind machines, computer hard drives and most electrical motors require permanent magnets to operate. These are typically made of neodymium-iron-boron alloys, because of their large magnetocrystalline anisotropy and saturation magnetization. However, the magnets use considerable amounts of increasingly expensive rare-earth compounds such as neodymium and dysprosium, thus alternatives are strongly sought after, but with little success so far. Shin-ichi Ohkoshi and colleagues now demonstrate that a relative of common rust could solve this problem.