Is gold attractive to magnets?
Can you use a magnet to find gold hidden at the beach or in your clutter drawer?
Gold Will Not Attract a Magnet
For gold to be attracted to magnetic fields, or ferromagnetic, it would need unpaired electrons, creating a magnetic dipole. The dipole is what causes magnetic attraction.
Gold is diamagnetic like silver. Diamagnetic materials have a net magnetic force that opposes the polar direction of a magnetized field.
What this means is that magnetic fields slightly repel diamagnetic materials. Have you ever wondered why, some metals are attracted to magnets and others are not?
What Makes Gold Diamagnetic?
Gold atoms have 71 electrons, which means gold atoms will always have one unpaired electron. Materials with an odd number of electrons in their atomic structure are diamagnetic.
To figure out if a particle is paramagnetic (or weakly attracted to magnetic fields) or diamagnetic. If a particle’s electrons are all paired, then it is paramagnetic. If there are unpaired electrons, it is diamagnetic.
Diamagnetism was discovered in 1778 when Anton Brugmans noticed that magnetic fields repelled bismuth. Properties like diamagnetism are present in all materials, but other magnetic forces, like ferromagnetism, overpower them in many materials.
