Uniform growth of clusters of magnetic nanoparticles in a rotating magnetic field

Abstract

It was recently shown that the exposure of magnetic microbeads to a homogeneous magnetic field, which rotates around the axis perpendicular to the field direction, generates highly ordered two-dimensional particle arrays. In this work, the impact of downscaling such systems is analyzed. Dilutions of cobalt nanoparticles with an average diameter of 6 nm were brought into a rotating homogeneous magnetic field. A strong localization of the number of particles within a certain cluster size can be observed if the rotation frequency is adjusted to a specific particle concentration. In particular, we obtain an increase of 85 % of the maximum of the cluster size distribution, when changing the rotation frequency of the magnetic field from 300 to 750 rpm for a cobalt concentration of 35.95 mmol/l. We propose a heuristic model to explain the observed frequency dependence.