Abstract
Magnetic structures have attracted a great interest due to their multiple applications, from physics to biomedicine. Several techniques are currently employed to investigate magnetic characteristics and other physicochemical properties of magnetic structures. The major objective of this review is to summarize the current knowledge on the usage, advances, advantages, and disadvantages of a large number of techniques that are currently available to characterize magnetic systems. The present review, aiming at helping in the choice of the most suitable method as appropriate, is divided into three sections dedicated to characterization techniques. Firstly, the magnetism and magnetization (hysteresis) techniques are introduced. Secondly, the visualization methods of the domain structures by means of different probes are illustrated. Lastly, the characterization of magnetic nanosystems in view of possible biomedical applications is discussed, including the exploitation of magnetism in imaging for cell tracking/visualization of pathological alterations in living systems (mainly by magnetic resonance imaging, MRI).
Highlights
Since the early beginning of our society, magnetism catalyzed the attention of scientists worldwide due to its intrinsic capability to naturally attract/move inanimate matter [1,2]
The major objective of this review is to summarize the current knowledge on the usage, advances, advantages, and disadvantages of a large number of techniques that are currently available to characterize magnetic systems
The scientific literature reported a plethora of research studies and documents characterized by different physicochemical, morphological, and biological methods, fundamental for pointing out their magnetic response/properties
Summary
Since the early beginning of our society, magnetism catalyzed the attention of scientists worldwide due to its intrinsic capability to naturally attract/move inanimate matter [1,2]. The analysis of the state-of-art pointed out that the scientific literature is very rich in reviews focused on the production/testing of magnetic materials in various fields [25,26,27,28], assuming as elementary the comprehension of the adopted characterization techniques. On the basis of the authors’ experience, a superficial (and simplistic) interpretation of these data could leave to misleading (and in some cases incorrect) analysis [1]. In this context, it is worthy of note that there are many previous publications related to these subjects, including reviews and books. Some of them [24,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36] can be still considered as “classical” as they are constantly used in many laboratories around the world
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