George Hadjipanayis, the Richard B. Murray Professor of Physics and chairperson of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Delaware, is the principal investigator on the project. He will coordinate a team of chemists, material scientists, physicists, and engineers from the University of Delaware; University of Nebraska; Northeastern University; Virginia Commonwealth University; the US Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University, in Ames, Iowa; and the Electron Energy Corporation in Landisville, Pa.

Hadjipanayis was one of the three researchers who discovered the Nd-Fe-B magnets in the early 1980s. In the new project, he and his team will be working to identify new materials that will result in magnets twice as strong as those currently in existence.

The UD-led team will explore three different routes over the three-year project:

• Discover new materials in tertiary rare earth-transition metal-element X systems that have not yet been explored due to synthesis difficulties such as vapor pressure, high reactivity, toxicity, or their refractory nature.

• Develop materials that are free of rare earth metals and stabilized by the addition of small non-magnetic atoms (Fe-Co-X).

• Use the bottom-up approach to develop high-energy nanocomposite materials consisting of a uniform and nanoscale mixture of high anisotropy hard (Nd-Fe-B) and high magnetization soft (Fe) magnetic phases.

At the recent International Conference on Magnetism 2009 held in Germany, Prof. Hadjipanayis gave an invited talk on a novel experimental approach for large-scale fabrication of rare-earth-transition-metal magnetic nanoparticles.

The approach of the University of Delaware researchers is based on high-energy ball milling, which for two decades has been employed in manufacturing of nanocrystalline and amorphous permanent magnet materials. In their study, the milling was done in the presence of surfactants (oleic acid) which kept the size of the particles small. The SmCo particles fabricated by this technique had an average size down to 5-6 nm and exhibited a room-temperature coercivity of up to 19 kOe.

These nanoparticles are expected to play a very important role (as a hard magnetic component) in the synthesis of nanocomposite high performance permanent magnets with double the strength of the best existing magnets. The hard magnetic flakes, which were also fabricated by this procedure, could have applications in laminated magnets with increased electrical resistivity and high-gradient magnetic filters.