Researchers at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) have defied years of scientific consensus by successfully proving that carbon contains its own magnetic properties, according to a study in the May 4 issue of “Physical Review Letters.” While many experts in the field had attempted to confirm the element’s magnetic properties in the past, they had been unable to do so until now.

Hendrik Ohldag, lead author of the study and a staff scientist at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL), worked in conjunction with specialists from SLAC, Germany’s University of Leipzig and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to perform the experiment. Ohldag said that the findings should alter the scientific and technological perceptions of carbon.

“It will forever change the perception of the element,” Ohldag said. “[Before], if you looked at carbon, you would never think about its magnetic properties. Now you will have to remember the magnetic properties any time you use it.”

Carbon is one of the most abundant materials on Earth and is the foundation of biological life. But until now magnetism, a property generally linked with only a few types of metals — including nickel, iron and cobalt — was excluded from carbon’s list of physical properties. Prior attempts by researchers to link magnetism to carbon were widely disregarded and attributed to the presence of other magnetic substances in the sample.

“We have proven for the first time that a carbon sample can be magnetic without having dirt or anything in it,” Ohldag said.

Now that carbon’s magnetic properties have been established, Ohldag said, the implications for industries and technologies which utilize carbon-based materials are enormous. For designers of computer microchips and nanotechnologies — many of which use magnetization as a method of embedding codes and information — the new discovery has the potential to open new doors to technological improvements.

“One can now look more closely into nanodevices,” Ohldag said, “and see how they can make more sophisticated nanodevices that are magnetized.”