Relaxation in magnetic nanostructures

Nanostructured magnetic materials present a wide range of magnetic relaxation phenomena. One problem in studying nanomagnetic granular materials is the strong dependence of the relaxation with the anisotropy barrier which, even for systems with narrow size distributions, brings difficulties in the analysis of the experimental data. Molecular magnetism, with the chemists ' bottom-up approach to build molecular nanostructures, provides this field with some beautiful model systems, well ordered crystals of single molecule magnets, single molecule chains, molecular magnetic multilayers and others novelties to appear. Most of these systems present slow relaxation and the study of these well-characterized nanomaterials may elucidate many features that are difficult to grasp in the non molecular materials. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.