Magnet is a material that provides magnetic field. A
magnetic field is invisible, however, responsible for most notable property of
a magnet: a force that pulls on other ferromagnetic materials, such as iron,
and attracts or repels other magnets.
A
permanent magnet is an object made from the material that is magnetized and
creats its own persistent magnetic field. An every day example is a
refrigerator magnet used to hold notes on the door. Materials that can be
magnetized, which are also the ones that are strongly attracted to a magnet,
are called ferromagnetic. These include iron, nickel, cobalt, some alloys of
rare earth metals, and some naturally occurring minerals such as lodestone.
Although ferromagnetic materials are the only ones attracted to a magnet
strongly enough to be commonly considered magnetic, all other substances
respond weakly to a magnetic field, by one of several other types of magnetism.
Ferromagnetic materials can be divided into magnetically “soft”
materials like annealed iron, which can be magnetized but do not tend to stay
magnetized, and magnetically hard materials, which do. Permanent magnets are
made from “hard” ferromagnetic materials such as alnico and ferrite that are
subjected to special processing in a powerful magnetic field during
manufacture, to align their internal microcrystalline structure, making them
very hard to demagnetize. To demagnetize a saturated magnet, a certain magnetic
field must be applied, and this threshold depends on cercivity of the
respective material. “Hard” materials have high coercivity, whereas “soft”
materials have low coercivity
The overall strength of a magnet is measured by its magnetic
moment or, alternatively, the total magnetic flux it produces. The local
strength of magnetism in material is measured by its magnetization.
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