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Spins and arrows of outrageous fortune

Neutron diffraction

Nature volume 511, pages 10–11 (2014)Cite this article

This radically changed during the grim and purposeful years of the Second World War, which saw the completion of the first nuclear reactors. When the war came to an end, scientists such as Ernst Wollan rallied to make the best possible use of the newly available facilities. In 1946, he started his first neutron scattering experiments at the Oak Ridge nuclear reactor in Tennessee, a large graphite block measuring 7 m on each side and pierced with uranium rods. Clifford Shull joined him and they set to work developing the principles of neutron diffraction.

In 1949, a modest one-page report by Shull and James Samuel Smart appeared in Physical Review, reporting just a few neutron scattering peaks for manganese oxide, a material with a simple cubic crystal. The paper did no less than confirm an outstanding prediction in fundamental magnetism. In 1932, Louis Néel suggested that some materials can be magnetically ordered, yet are not overall magnetic. In these so-called antiferromagnets, the elementary magnetic moments, or spins, would have alternating orientations and cancel each other out.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPERS

  1. Shull, C. G. & Smart, J. S. Detection of antiferromagnetism by neutron diffraction. Phys. Rev. 76, 1256 (1949)

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  2. Muhlbauer, S. et al. Skyrmion lattice in a chiral magnet. Science 323, 915–919 (2009)

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FURTHER READING

  1. Mason, T. E., Gawne, T. J., Nagler, S. E., Nestor, M. B. & Carpenter, J. M. The early development of neutron diffraction: science in the wings of the Manhattan Project. Acta Crystallogr. A 69, 37–44 (2013)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Senior Editor, Nature,

    Liesbeth Venema

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  1. Liesbeth Venema
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Venema, L. Spins and arrows of outrageous fortune. Nature 511 (Suppl 7509), 10–11 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13356

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