Hard magnets, also referred to as permanent magnets, are magnetic materials that retain their magnetism after being magnetised. Practically, this means materials that have an intrinsic coercivity of greater than ~10kAm-1.
It is believed that permanent magnets have been used for compasses by the Chinese since
~2500BC. However, it was only in the early twentieth century that high carbon steels and then tungsten / chromium containing steels replaced lodestone as the best available permanent magnet material. These magnets were permanent magnets due to the pinning of domain walls by dislocations and inclusions. The movement of dislocations within a material is often hindered by the same factors that effect the motion of domain walls and as a consequence these steels are mechanically very hard and are the origin of the term hard magnetic. These magnets had an
energy product of approximately 8kJm–
