I have heard of rare Earth magnets. Is there any difference in the magnetic strength using neodymium over other materials?What makes it so strong?
Neodymium Iron Boride magets are one of the strongest you can get. The other very strong type of note is Samarium-Cobalt, but they can be rather brittle, and have a relatively low Curie temperature (temperature at which they are non-magnetic). In general the rare earth elements can achieve very high magnetic field strengths because they fall in the range of the periodic table with partially filled f-orbitals. The magnetic field strength is directly proportional to the number of unpaired electrons in a given orbital, and the f-orbital (which has 14 total states) can accommodate up to 7 unpaired electrons. Most of the non-rare earth metals only have enough electrons to fill d-orbitals, which can accomodate a maximum of only 5 unpaired electrons.
magnetic properties are dictated by irregulaties in the electron spins of certain metals, which are called ferromagnitic elements after the latin word for iron, which was the first of such elements to be discovered. some rare earth elements are capable of more extreme spin irregularities and thus are more ferromagnitic than iron
