Magnet
A permanent magnet is an object made from a material that is magnetized and creates its own persistent magnetic field. An everyday example is a refrigerator magnet used to hold notes on a refrigerator door. Materials that can be magnetized, which are also the ones that are strongly attracted to a magnet, are called ferromagnetic (or ferrimagnetic). These include the elements iron, nickel and cobalt, some alloys of rare-earth metals, and some naturally occurring minerals such as lodestone. Although ferromagnetic (and ferrimagnetic) materials are the only ones attracted to a magnet strongly enough to be commonly considered magnetic, all other substances respond weakly to a magnetic field, by one of several other types of magnetism.
Ferrite core
Ferrites are ceramic compounds of the transition metals with oxygen, which are ferrimagnetic but nonconductive. Ferrites that are used in transformer or electromagnetic cores contain iron oxides combined with nickel, zinc, and/or manganese compounds. They have a low coercivity and are called ""soft ferrites"" to distinguish them from ""hard ferrites"", which have a high coercivity and are used to make ferrite magnets. The low coercivity means the material's magnetization can easily reverse direction without dissipating much energy (hysteresis losses), while the material's high resistivity prevents eddy currents in the core, another source of energy loss. The most common soft ferrites are: