274

Magnetic materials
Since both the shape

of the resonant curve and the exact value of the

* See also Section I 1.9.5

resonant frequency depend on the environment in which a nucleus finds itsel[, nuclear magnetic resonance can be used as a tool to investigate the properties of crystals*. An important application in a different direction is the precision measurement of magnetic fields. The proton resonance of water is generally used for this purpose. The accuracy that can be achieved is about I part in 106.

11

.8.5

Cyclotron resonance

We have already discussed the phenomenon of cyclotron resonance fro6 g classical point of view, and we shall now consider it quantum mechanically. For resonant absorption one needs at least lwo energy levels or, even betteq many energy levels equally spaced from each other. What are the energy levels of an electron in a solid? Remember that in our earlier model we neglected the interaction betr.veen elcctrons and simply assumed that the solid may be regarded as an infinte potential well. The possible energy levels were then given by eqn (6.2).

fi: . h: "E: _m rtnl +nf,+r?1. -' rli +fi +k:r: ; 6 m\10 )'
.

* The effect ol the magnetic field may be taken into account by replacing p:

where n.. rl\, n-- are integers. When a magnetic field is applied in the :-direction, then the above equation mcldifies to*

bl (p - r,A): in the Hamiltonian of

Schriidinser's equation (u,here A is the
vector potential).

/ li h2 E:It"+ )1t..+ l-t?, 1/ ' \ )nt-

(11.50)

rvhere ,,. is an integer and o. is the cyclotron frequency. For constant k,, the difference betrveen the energy levels (called Landau levels) is fia;.. Hence, we may look upon cvclotron resonance as a process in which electrons are excited by the incident electromagnetic wave from one energy level to the next.

11.8.6

The quantum Hall effect

Strictly speaking this does not belong to magnetic resonance (although Landau levels are involved) and may be a little out of piace in an engineering textbook. The argument for including it is that there might be some relationship to high temperalure superconductivity (see Section i4.9) which is of great practicai
significance. and it is also true that the effect would have never been discovered had not engineers invented field effect transistors, whose operation depended on a fwo-dimensional electron gas (see Section 9. l5). You may remember the discussion of the ordinary Hall effect in Chapter l. The experimental set-up for the quantum Hall effect is exactly the same. The only difference is that the dimension of the current channel perpendicular to the applied magnetic field is now comparable with the electron wavelength. The requirements fbr observing the effect are high magnetic fields (B : l0T) and low temperatures. say a few K. The measured value is the so-called Hall resistance, which relates the measured transverse voltage (Hall voltage) to the longitudinal current. Since the Hall voltage is known to be proportional to the applied magnetic field [eqn ( 1.20)] we would expect the Hall resistance versus