Let there be light: Teaching magnets to do more than just st...(dmium selenide but replaced some nonmagn...)

Beams of photons were used to align all of the manganese ions' spins, creating magnetic fields as much as 500 times more powerful than in the same semiconductor material without manganese. The magnetic effects were strongest at low temperatures, but remained remarkably strong up to room temperature, Gamelin said.

Besides Gamelin, authors of the Science paper are Rmi Beaulac and Paul Archer of the UW and Lars Schneider and Gerd Bacher of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany.

In a second paper published Sunday (Aug. 16) in the online edition of Nature Nanotechnology, Gamelin's group reported related effects in semiconductor nanocrystals made of zinc oxide but also containing small amounts of manganese impurities.

With zinc oxide, photons acted more as an on-off switch once photons altered the zinc oxide's magnetism, the photon stream could be removed and the effect remained in place until another stimulus was applied to turn the effect off again.

Besides Gamelin, authors of the Nature Nanotechnology paper are Stefan Ochsenbein, Yong Feng, Kelly Whitaker, Ekaterina Badaeva, William Liu and Xiaosong Li, all of the UW.

Some behaviors described in the papers have been seen previously at very low temperatures, but in those cases the active materials were embedded in other crystals and so could not be isolated or processed. Suspending the nanocrystals in a colloid solution brings the magnetic effects into a new functional form that could be useful for integration with unconventional materials, Gamelin said. For example, the solution containing the crystals could be applied to a film using a device like an ink jet printer, or interfaced with
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