About the cover
January 2008 Volume 3 No 1
The magnetization of a magnetic material often prefers to lie along an 'easy' axis. This magnetic anisotropy is weak in bulk samples of transition metals, but it becomes much stronger in nanowires. Now Erio Tosatti and colleagues have predicted that platinum nanowires should exhibit a novel phenomenon called colossal magnetic anisotropy, in which the magnetization is finite in directions along the nanowire, and zero at right angles to this direction. The cover image is based on contour plots of the anisotropy energy as a function of magnetic moment (see Fig. 2c on page 23).
Cover design by Karen Moore.