Antiferromagnetism is a type of magnetism that occurs when the magnetic ordering of adjacent spins are antiparallel. This phenomenon was first observed in 1922 by French physicist Louis Néel, and further developed by physicists such as Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg in the early 1930s. It can be found in materials such as iron oxide, chromium oxide, manganese oxide, copper sulfide, and nickel arsenide among others. Antiferromagnetic structures exhibit a variety of interesting physical properties; these include zero net magnetization (the sum of all individual spin contributions cancel out), alternating exchange interactions between neighboring spins (which changes sign depending on the orientation of each spin) as well as temperature-dependent behavior.
At low temperatures antiferromagnets undergo long range order due to strong Coulombic interactions between electrons at opposite sites within the lattice which results in an antiparallel alignment of spins along different crystallographic directions. At high temperatures this order is destroyed due to thermal fluctuations which break up the ordered arrangement into local clusters with randomly oriented spins known as “spin glass” or “cluster glass” states. In addition to their unique physical properties antiferromagnets also have many potential applications including quantum computing devices and spintronics components for data storage applications which employ both classical electrical currents and electron spin orientations.
Researchers continue to study antiferromagnetism from different points-of-view ranging from theoretical investigations on its microscopic origin through experiments probing its macroscopic behavior under various conditions such as pressure or temperature variations; this has allowed us to gain greater insight into its nature while discovering new phenomena associated with it at larger length scales than previously thought possible.