Emergence of magnetism in bulk amorphous palladium

Abstract

Magnetism in palladium has been the subject of much work and speculation. Bulk crystalline palladium is paramagnetic with a high magnetic susceptibility. Palladium under pressure and palladium nanoclusters have generated interest to scrutinize its magnetic properties. Here we report another possibility: Palladium may become an itinerant ferromagnet in the amorphous bulk phase at atmospheric pressure. Atomic palladium is a d 10 element, whereas bulk crystalline Pd is a d 10−x (sp) x material; this, together with the possible presence of unsaturated bonds in amorphous materials, may explain the remnant magnetism reported herein. This work presents and discusses magnetic effects in bulk amorphous palladium.

Nanomagnetism in porous amorphous palladium, a sequel. A possible light-weight magnet

“…We pretend to contribute to this understanding by performing computational simulations of the topology, the electronic structure and the magnetic properties of some porous and amorphous metallic systems, pure and alloyed. The present study follows on the footsteps of our prediction that amorphous palladium, a-Pd, displays magnetism in the bulk [1]. Our reasoning is that since a defective structure of palladium, like the amorphous phase, displays magnetism then an even more defective one, like the porousamorphous topology, pa-Pd, should display magnetism as well.…”

“…Palladium behaves in a non-expected manner when expanded or contracted [2], or confined to a restricted dimensionality [3] and certainly when amorphous in the bulk [1], as opposed to the behavior of the lone atom. It has also been found that Pd develops magnetism when alloyed with H [4,5], or silicon, both liquid [6] or solid [7].…”

“…Other works on the experimental generation of porous palladium are found in references [11][12][13], all since 2008. However, to the best of our knowledge, no reference to magnetic properties of porous-amorphous palladium has been made; therefore, we decided to extend the investigation of the magnetism found in a-Pd [1] to enquire into a possible magnetism of a defective structure like pa-Pd. In this work we report findings that indicate the presence of nanomagnetism in samples with different porosities (generated using the expandedlattice approach cultivated in our group [14]), and with different structures; some resulting from a molecular dynamics (MD) procedure applied to the expanded-lattice structures and some others in local equilibrium, consequence of a geometry optimization (GO) procedure applied to the outcome of the MD process.…”

Correlation: An Analysis Tool for Liquids and for Amorphous Solids

“…In order to assess the performance of´Correlation´, we calculated the PDF and PAD for two well known structures (Crystalline Silicon and a Graphene Layer), and compared the results with the commercially available software Forcite included in the Materials Studio suite (Materials Studio 2016; to test Correlation in amorphous and liquid materials we selected amorphous palladium (Rodríguez et al, 2019), amorphous palladium hydride (Rodríguez, 2019) and liquid bismuth. Because of the complexity to calculate PAD of amorphous and liquids in Forcite, we chose to compare them with the code developed by U. Santiago within our group.…”

Disorder in energy materials and strategies to model it

“…[120] recently to design disordered materials [121,122]. In this approach, first, a supercell of the crystalline counterpart of the amorphous material is constructed with the same density as the amorphous phase.…”