Text: From: Dave Stuva,OMUG OnLine David P. Lentini and Dale L. Pond are right and I stand corrected. I confused diamagnetic and paramagnetic. The definition and explanation that I gave before are not for diamagnetic materials but for paramagnetic materials. The paramagnetic properties of a substance are indeed associated with asymmetical electronic configurations (i.e., unpaired electrons), but that does not mean necessarily that it is an odd number of electrons. Oxygen molecules, for instance, have 16 electrons, but because of the orbital configuration (molecular orbital theory) 2 of them are unpaired, and liquid oxygen shows small but significant magnetic properties.

See Also: PARAMAGNETISM; OXYGEN

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