Physicists in Greece, Australia and Russia have made a new form of carbon that has the lowest density ever reported for a solid – just 2 milligrams per cubic centimetre. The material is a nano-foam of carbon clusters and is the first form of pure carbon to display ferromagnetism, albeit temporary, at room temperature. The team, which presented its results at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Montreal yesterday, says the foam could be used for spintronic applications and in medical imaging (A Rode et al. 2004 arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0310751).
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