The inter action between the magnetic field generated by the neutron and the magnetic moment of atoms containing unpaired electrons was experimentally demonstrated for the first time about twenty years ago. The basic theory describing such an in teraction had already been developed and the first nuclear reactors with large available thermal neutron fluxes had recently been con structed. The power of the magnetic neutron interaction for in vestigating the structure of magnetic materials was immediately recognized and put to use where possible. Neutron diffraction, however, was practicable only in countries with nuclear reactors. The earliest neutron determinations of magnetic ordering were hence primarily carried out at Oak Ridge and Brookhaven in the US, at Chalk River in Canada and at Harwell in England. Diffraction patterns from polycrystalline ferromagnets and antiferromagnets are interpretable if produced by simple spin arrays. More complex magnetic scattering patterns could often be unravelled, in terms of a three-dimensional array of atomic moments, if the specimen studied is a single crystal. The devel opment of sophisticated cryogenic equipment, with independently alignable magnetic fields, opened the way to greater complexity in the magnetic structures that could be successfully determined, as did also the introduction of polarized neutron beams. By the end of the 'sixties, many countries were contributing significantly to neutron diffraction studies of a wide variety of magnetic materials.
About half a century ago Landau formulated the central principles of the phe nomenological second-order phase transition theory which is based on the idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking at phase transition. By means of this ap proach it has been possible to treat phase transitions of different nature in altogether distinct systems from a unified viewpoint, to embrace the aforemen tioned transitions by a unified body of mathematics and to show that, in a certain sense, physical systems in the vicinity of second-order phase transitions exhibit universal behavior. For several decades the Landau method has been extensively used to an alyze specific phase transitions in systems and has been providing a basis for interpreting experimental data on the behavior of physical characteristics near the phase transition, including the behavior of these characteristics in systems subject to various external effects such as pressure, electric and magnetic fields, deformation, etc. The symmetry aspects of Landau's theory are perhaps most effective in analyzing phase transitions in crystals because the relevant body of mathemat ics for this symmetry, namely, the crystal space group representation, has been worked out in great detail. Since particular phase transitions in crystals often call for a subtle symmetry analysis, the Landau method has been continually refined and developed over the past ten or fifteen years.
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