Curie's law
Relation of magnetization to applied magnetic field and temperature / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Curie's law?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
For many paramagnetic materials, the magnetization of the material is directly proportional to an applied magnetic field, for sufficiently high temperatures and small fields. However, if the material is heated, this proportionality is reduced. For a fixed value of the field, the magnetic susceptibility is inversely proportional to temperature, that is
This article needs additional citations for verification. (September 2014) |
where
- is the (volume) magnetic susceptibility,
- is the magnitude of the resulting magnetization (A/m),
- is the magnitude of the applied magnetic field (A/m),
- is absolute temperature (K),
- is a material-specific Curie constant (K).
Pierre Curie discovered this relation, now known as Curie's law, by fitting data from experiment. It only holds for high temperatures and weak magnetic fields. As the derivations below show, the magnetization saturates in the opposite limit of low temperatures and strong fields. If the Curie constant is null, other magnetic effects dominate, like Langevin diamagnetism or Van Vleck paramagnetism.