Physicists and chemists have been interested in devising materials and methods to induce ferromagentic order in several oxides. Such studies provide an understanding of the fundamental mechanisms involved. In addition, these materials are candidates for potential applications in magnetic memories, sensors etc. Typical examples are ferrites and garnets. However there are other oxides which show novel properties. In this talk, I will describe three such classes of materials – double layer spin cluster glass manganites that exhibit a resistance drop of 1 million in moderate fields but at low temperatures, frustrated pyrochlores where ferromagentic order is induced by proper selection of substitution and undoped indium oxide in which charge carriers seem to be spin polarized.
