J. Ping Liu of the University of Texas at Arlington will explore a century-old puzzle in understanding and engineering magnetic coercivity.

Thursday Sep 17, 2026 6:30–8:00 PM PT Hybrid Meeting Online or at Quadrant San Jose, CA REGISTER

How “hard,” or coercive, can a ferromagnet be? This deceptively simple question has remained a puzzle for a century. Magnetic coercivity is one of the most important properties of permanent magnets in advanced applications. Despite decades of effort to understand coercivity mechanisms, the problem remains incompletely solved, limiting our ability to design improved permanent magnets for growing application demands.

It remains highly challenging to predict and calculate coercivity in any type of magnet. Eighty years ago, William Fuller Brown proposed his famous theorem correlating coercivity with magnetocrystalline anisotropy in ferromagnetic materials. In practice, however, experimental coercivity values have remained far below the levels predicted by the theorem, leading to the so-called Brown’s Paradox.

Progress during the past twenty years has improved our understanding of coercivity mechanisms in nanoscale, low-dimensional ferromagnets, including nanoparticles, thin films, and especially nanowires. A systematic study of Co nanowires exhibiting extraordinarily high coercivity above the magnetocrystalline anisotropy field has opened a path toward resolving Brown’s Paradox and toward Anisotropy Engineering of future permanent magnets.

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J. Ping Liu received his Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. For the past four decades, he has worked in research and development of permanent magnets and related magnetic materials in China, Europe, and the United States.

He is currently a Distinguished University Professor at The University of Texas at Arlington and an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and the IEEE. His current research focuses on hard magnetic nanoparticles, thin films, and bulk nanocomposites, as reported in more than 350 peer-reviewed journal articles, review articles, and books. He also serves as Editor of the serial Handbook of Magnetic Materials published by Elsevier.

Dr. Liu has supervised more than 60 graduate students and post-doctoral researchers. He received the Outstanding Achievement Award at the 25th International Workshop on Rare-Earth and Future Permanent Magnets and Their Applications in 2018 and the Hill Prize in Physical Sciences from the Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology in 2025.

He has given approximately 300 invited talks worldwide, including IEEE Magnetics Distinguished Lectures, the Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium, and the Tohoku Forum for Creativity.