U.S. Navy researchers at the Carderock Division discovered in 1998 that alloying gallium into iron amplifies iron's magnetostrictive effect up to tenfold.
In 2009, Virginia Tech and NIST scientists used neutron beams to show gallium clumping that turns some faces of iron's cubic cells slightly rectangular — 'raisins within a cake' in NIST physicist Peter Gehring's words.
Unlike brittle Terfenol-D, machinable galfenol is produced in sheet and wire form for sonar detectors, vibrational energy harvesting, precision actuators and anti-vibration systems.