Fundamental Aspects of Nanomagnetism and Its Versatile Applications

Nanotechnology allows humans to explore quantum mechanics to develop functional materials with incredible precision at atomic and molecular levels. Over the last few decades, it has proven the potential for revolutionary advancements in multidisciplinary fields such as agriculture, pollution remediation, environmental sustainability, metallurgy, and medicine to defense as well as most recently in biological fields like editing genes, diagnosis, and treatment of various diseases. The use of magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) in various fields increased enormously due to their inherent magnetism, unique physico-chemical properties, and non-toxicity. The properties of MNPs mainly depend on the uniformity of their size distribution and morphology. Therefore, the fundamental scientific aim is to synthesize uniform-sized nanomagnets with controllable morphologies to obtain the desired properties. On the other hand, bulk synthesis of uniformly distributed nanomagnets of high quality is critical to the researchers for their implementation in qualitative nanoscale devices and many biological applications. To date, several synthesis techniques have been established to obtain the required precise control of the shape and sizes of the nanomagnets for versatile applications. However, the development of monodispersed and aqueous stable nanomagnets is quite challenging for researchers. With the help of novel synthetic approaches and surface functionalization strategies, it is quite possible to achieve the above properties for versatile applications. This chapter discusses different types of magnetic materials and the origin of nanomagnetism along with their synthesis methods and versatile applications in magnetic data storage, biomedical, sensors, environmental remediation, energy conversion and storage, etc.