Transverse magneto-optical anisotropy in bidisperse ferrofluids with long range particle correlations

A comparative study between experiment and the predictions of a theoretical model developed for the description of magnetically induced dichroism in ferrofluids with long range interacting bidisperse spherical nanoparticles is presented. Magnetically induced dichroism in dilution series of two ferrofluids with different surfactant thickness was measured. Both ferrofluids show a concave solid volume fraction dependence of the specific dichroism, whose characteristics are very well qualitatively explained by the theoretical model. The theory fails to satisfactorily explain the magnetic field dependence of the highly concentrated samples specific dichroism, due to inherent approximations in the virial expansion of the pair correlation function.