Can magnets be nonmetallic?
(Q&A by Catherine Davis)

Apparently they can. Tatiana Makarova has found that C-60, a buckyball or a hollow molecular structure formed by 60 atoms of carbon, is magnetic at room temperature.

Only four elements, iron, cobalt, nickel, and gadolinium, are permanently magnetic at room temperature, but the search for nonmetallic magnets, which could be light, cheap, maybe even transparent, has lately become popular. Buckyballs are very weakly magnetic. "They won't stick to your refrigerator," says Makarova.

Why are buckyballs magnetic? There are a few hypotheses. One is that the 1-million-pounds-per-square-inch pressure needed to make the buckyballs magnetic collapses some of the buckyballs, thereby generating unpaired electrons. Another is that the buckyballs remain intact, but unpaired electrons arise at the bonds between them.

Although some scientists think that buckyballs are truly magnetic, other scientists think there might be contamination by a magnetic substance. For example, evidence of such contamination was found in an organic compound obtained from a meteorite. Until the contamination was identified, the carbon compound was thought to be magnetic.

Source: Discover Magazine, December, 2002.