Yadon Yin and coworkers of the University of California, Riverside have studied the magnetic properties of Fe3O4@SiO2 core/shell particles. They found that the packing of the particles changed from a polycrystalline fcc to a single-crystalline-like hexagonal arrangement depending on the applied magnetic field.
The authors suggest their finding may have important implications in the creation of new materials based on colloids.
Read this exciting Nanoscale Communication in full today:
Self-assembly and magnetically induced phase transition of three-dimensional colloidal photonic crystals
Le He, Vikas Malik, Mingsheng Wang, Yongxing Hu, Francesca Edith Anson and Yadong Yin
DOI: 10.1039/C2NR31068F
