If you're talking about Curie Temperatures and alloyed peri-ferromagnetic values, then you have to include certain noble gasses cooled below 0šKelvin, then you are correct.
Nickel may indeed exhibit certain values that can be construed as 'magnetic', when indeed they are not. According to the Pauli Principle, this is only occurring when the outer electrostatic charge is unbalanced due to valence changes and resulting electrical charge attraction, which is not true ferrous magnetism.
That is called 'exchange energy', and although considered rather altruistic, it is not really useful in the extraction of a nickel sliver from a finger by a magnet --- even a very strong magnet.
In the lab, of course, you can make a chicken bone 'magnetic' - but that is not under ambient conditions or where a human could live and breathe without considerable discomfort - like on the sun (Tc Curie) or inside a black hole (Tc Kelvin).
Ferromagnetic elemental superconductors are what could be called magnetic, but they are not usually made into guitar strings.
* - their half-life existence is in nanoseconds, so by the time you got a set of Ernie Ball Superconductor Ferromagnetic Bass Strings home, the package would be empty. As an inclusion: this may explain why EB strings go dead really fast or arrive dead in their packages. Hmmm.
The following periodic table shows the elements that exhibit ferromagnetic properties:::
Of them - the ones in the
Pacific Blue in the middle of the chart, are magnetic in nature and they are indeed 'ferromagnetic' in capacity.
Pure nickel and pure cobalt are indeed so, but they are typically alloyed and that destroys their magnetic dipole condition, and for most applications are not considered ferromagnetic, per-se.
The prefix to the term 'Ferro-' is applicable only to iron (Fe), or iron-alloyed metals for all intents and purposes.
The use of the same 'Ferro-' prefix assigned Cobalt and Nickel are for purpose of an iron quality as a benchmark and their individual magnetic attraction/repulsion values is not implying that Co or Ni are ferrous in molecular structure. (Fe is transient, whereas Co and Ni are not.)
I erred in not making that position noted to you, but for
bassonic string theories (
sorry for the bosonic string pun) - the nickel content in your strings should not cause one to venture into thinking it is magnetic like iron or steel.
eg: I doubt seriously that a sliver of nickel from a guitar string would exhibit enough attraction to a magnet to make it's extraction from a finger possible.
SIDEBAR::
I received a return e-mail from England, from the Rotosound company by a representative named Richard, concerning the alloy of nickel in their strings, and this is a short C/P from that letter:::
Quote:
The nickel content of our (Rotosound's) Monel 400 wrap material is 65%, quite high and very expensive.
< snip medical information here, which I consider proprietary in nature >
ibid: For this reason we do not keep records as to the amount of free nickel that’s likely to effect a players skin and very respectively, have never had to. This information would be available from our material suppliers laboratory in Germany of course. |
Not knowing the full alloy of their strings and the rest of the 35% being an unknown, it would be a lot of wishful thinking for pulling such an alloyed sliver out of your finger.
