Magnetic materials have been used with grain sizes down to the nanoscale for longer than any other type of material. This is because of a fundamental change in the magnetic structure of ferro- and ferrimagnetic materials when grain sizes are reduced. In these circumstances, the normal macroscopic domain structure transforms into a single domain state at a critical size which typically lies below 100 nm. Once this transformation occurs the mechanism of magnetisation reversal can only be via the rotation of the magnetisation vector from one magnetic easy axis to another via a magnetically hard direction. This change of reversal mechanism has led to a new class of magnetic materials whose properties and the basic underlying physical mechanism governing them were defined in a seminal work first published by E C Stoner and E P Wolhfarth in 1949.

As a consequence of this rotation mechanism, magnetic nanoparticles exist having coercivities which are highly controllable and lie between soft materials and normal permanent magnet materials. This ability to control coercivity in such particles has led to a number of significant technological advances, particularly in the field of information storage. The high value of information storage technology has meant that since the 1950s an enormous research and development effort has gone into techniques for the preparation of magnetic particles and thin films having well defined properties. Hence, certainly since the 1960s, a wide range of techniques to produce both metallic and oxide magnetic nanoparticles with sizes ranging from 4-100 nm has been developed.

The availability of this wide range of materials led to speculation from the 1960s onwards that they may have applications in biology and medicine. The fact that a magnetic field gradient can be used to either remotely position or selectively filter biological materials leads to a number of obvious applications. These applications fall broadly into two categories: those involving the use in-vivo and those involving the use of magnetic particles in-vitro. Obviously for safety reasons the development of in-vitro applications are more accessible. However, and somewhat ironically, the one application currently used on a significant scale involves the use of magnetic particles to produce a distortion in the magnetic field at a given site under examination via magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The presence of the particles at a given site can alter the contrast of certain types of cells by several orders of magnitude, making visible objects that were hitherto difficult to image.

With the increasing sophistication of pharmaceuticals, the dramatic development of cell manipulation and even DNA sequencing, the possibility of using magnetic nanoparticles to improve the effectiveness of such technologies is obviously appealing. Hence there are proposals for drug delivery systems, particularly for anti-inflammatory agents and also for the use of magnetic separation technologies for rapid DNA sequencing.

A further and somewhat surprising application of magnetic nanoparticles lies in the production of controlled heating effects. Each cycle of a hysteresis loop of any magnetic material involves an energy loss proportional to the area of the loop. Hence if magnetic nanoparticles having the required coercivity are remotely positioned at a given site in the body, perhaps the site of a malignancy, then the application of an alternating magnetic field can be used to selectively warm a given area. It has been proposed that this simple physical effect could be used both to destroy cells directly or to induce a modest increase in temperature so as to increase the efficacy of either chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

Clearly this area of potential technology is highly novel and offers many exciting possibilities for future developments. The area is relatively young and highly multidisciplinary, requiring a range of scientific knowledge from inorganic chemistry involved in the preparation of the nanoparticles, through biochemistry and medical science to allow for their functionalisation, and of course the basic physics of how the properties of the magnetic particles can best be brought to bear. In consequence it is not possible for a single author to be able to produce an overview of such a wide range of disciplines in a single paper. Therefore, in this issue of Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics we have commissioned three separate reviews from leading groups in Western Europe covering in some detail the preparation of magnetic nanoparticles, their functionalisation with appropriate biomolecules for different applications and a review of the fundamental underlying physics behind the technology. We hope that this somewhat unusual combination of review articles in an applied physics journal will be of benefit to all those in the scientific community with interests in this area.

We are most grateful to all the authors of the three papers for their contribution to this issue of Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics and in particular for their willingness to coordinate their submissions so as to enable this cluster of review articles to appear in a single issue.