{"id":216787,"date":"2025-06-28T10:12:41","date_gmt":"2025-06-28T15:12:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/magnetic-frustration-in-atacamite-triggers-dramatic-cooling-when-exposed-to-strong-fields"},"modified":"2025-06-28T10:12:41","modified_gmt":"2025-06-28T15:12:41","slug":"magnetic-frustration-in-atacamite-triggers-dramatic-cooling-when-exposed-to-strong-fields","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/magnetic-frustration-in-atacamite-triggers-dramatic-cooling-when-exposed-to-strong-fields","title":{"rendered":"Magnetic frustration in atacamite triggers dramatic cooling when exposed to strong fields"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/magnetic-frustration-in-atacamite-triggers-dramatic-cooling-when-exposed-to-strong-fields2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Natural crystals fascinate with their vibrant colors, their nearly flawless appearance and their manifold symmetrical forms. But researchers are interested in them for quite different reasons: Among the countless minerals already known, they always discover some materials with unusual magnetic properties.<\/p>\n<p>One of these is atacamite, which exhibits magnetocaloric behavior at low temperatures\u2014that is, the material\u2019s temperature changes significantly when it is subjected to a <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/magnetic+field\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">magnetic field<\/a>. A team headed by TU Braunschweig and the HZDR has now investigated this rare property. In the long term, the results, now <a href=\"https:\/\/link.aps.org\/doi\/10.1103\/PhysRevLett.134.216701\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Physical Review Letters<\/i>, could help to develop new materials for energy-efficient magnetic cooling.<\/p>\n<p>The emerald-green mineral atacamite, named for the place it was first found, the Atacama Desert in Chile, gets its characteristic coloring from the copper ions it contains. These ions also determine the material\u2019s magnetic properties: they each have an unpaired electron whose spin gives the ion a <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/magnetic+moment\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">magnetic moment <\/a>\u2014comparable to a tiny needle on a compass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Natural crystals fascinate with their vibrant colors, their nearly flawless appearance and their manifold symmetrical forms. But researchers are interested in them for quite different reasons: Among the countless minerals already known, they always discover some materials with unusual magnetic properties. One of these is atacamite, which exhibits magnetocaloric behavior at low temperatures\u2014that is, the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497,1635],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy","category-materials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216787\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}