The employees of the Department of Inorganic Chemistry at Moscow State University, together with their colleagues from the USA, Germany and Estonia, synthesized and studied a new magnetic active material. The unusual properties of obtained compounds open up the new opportunities for both scientific and applied work.

The chemists of Moscow State University synthesized compounds with a complex structure of simple substances - powders of iron, germanium, phosphorus and arsenic. In this work the scientists determined the atomic structure of compounds, consisting of blocks of two types structures, alternating in the same plane.

The study of magnetic properties of these compounds showed that all of them turned out to be antiferromagnetics — the substances in which magnetic moments of neighboring atoms (ions) cancel out each other, so that the total magnetic moment (magnetization) of the body is close to zero, unlike ferromagnetic (iron, cobalt), having their own magnetization.

The research results have been published in the Journal of Alloys and Compounds.