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Curie-Weiss law



The Curie-Weiss law describes the magnetic susceptibility of a ferromagnet in the paramagnetic region above the Curie point:

\chi = \frac{C}{T - T_{c}}

where

χ is the magnetic susceptibility
C is a material-specific Curie constant
T is absolute temperature, measured in kelvins
Tc is the Curie temperature, measured in kelvins

The susceptibility has a singularity at T = Tc. At this temperature and below there exists a spontaneous magnetization.

In many materials the Curie-Weiss law fails to describe the susceptibility in the immediate vicinity of the Curie point, since it is based on a mean-field approximation. Instead, there is a critical behavior of the form

\chi \sim \frac{1}{(T - T_{c})^\gamma}

with the critical exponent \gamma\,. However, at temperatures T \gg T_c the expression of the Curie-Weiss law still holds, but with T_c\, representing a temperature which is somewhat higher than the actual Curie temperature.


See also

References

Introduction to Solid State Physics 7th ed. (1996) by Charles Kittel

 
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Curie-Weiss_law". A list of authors is available in Wikipedia.
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