The study of the magnetic properties of matter strong magnetic fields.—I.—The balance and its properties

Abstract

In several previous communications the author has described a method by which magnetic fields up to 300,000 gauss could be obtained for a duration of time of the order of 1/100 of a second. It was shown that these magnetic fields, in spite of the shortness of their duration, can be applied to the study of different phenomena such as the change of resistance, the Zeeman effect, and others. The present paper describes a number of investigations which have been made on different substances, extending the application of intense magnetic fields to the study of magnetic susceptibility and magnetostriction. The interest in measuring the susceptibility of different substances in strong magnetic fields lies mainly in seeing whether the linear law of magnetisation for ordinary para- and diamagnetic substances holds for higher fields, and also in the investigation of the saturation of paramagnetic bodies at low temperatures, with a view to determining the elementary magnetic moments. In the present communication a method of measuring the magnetic susceptibility is described and experimental results are given which verify the linear law of magnetisation for several paramagnetic and diamagnetic substances. The saturation of iron and nickel in strong fields is also studied. As will be seen later, the possibility of making these measurements in such a small fraction of time results from the increased magnitude of the phenomenon itself. The most direct method for measuring the magnetic susceptibility is to record the force on a magnetised body in an inhomogeneous magnetic field. In the usual experiments at room temperature this force is only a few hundred dynes, but when fields reach the magnitude of 300 kilogauss the force becomes several grams, and is then sufficiently large to be measured with fair accuracy even in short times of the order of 1/100 of a second. In this paper a special type of balance will be described by which these measurements are made possible.