Scientists Have Confirmed the Existence of a Third Form of Magnetism
Scientists Have Confirmed the Existence of a Third Form of Magnetism
www.popularmechanics.com
Scientists Have Confirmed the Existence of a Third Form of Magnetism
61 comments
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This article is a mess and badly written.
Basicly magnetism comes from electron spin orientation. There are two well known spin configurations.
Ferromagnetism: there is at least one electron with a spin that isn't paired with an opposite spin electron. That atom then has a north and south magnetic pole. Like iron. Arrange all the atoms pointing the same way and you have a refrigerator magnet.
antiferromagnetism: all the electrons in the atom are paired with an opposite spin election. It's complicated but basically they couple together and there isn't a magnetic pole outside the atom. Like in copper.
Altermagnetism: what this article is about. You have a crystal of atoms with an unpaired electrons. The crystal would normally be ferromanetic. However they are arranged in a regular set of pairs that cause the electron spin to cancle out. Think of a checkerboard pattern where each white square cancels a black square next to it.
The antiferromagnetism and altermagnetism both have the spins cancelled out but the mechanism is different so there are different properties. Kramers degenerate vs wavevector.
In theory this gives you an extra state spin. So a magnetic drive uses a pattern of north and south to encode information. Ie NNSN becomes 0010.
With this you have north, south but also spin left, right. So you can encode more information.
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This is a bit outside my field. That said I don't think so.
The overall crystal should be very weakly magnetic. You want strong magnet with a high flux density so the electric field can push or pull against it.
I think this would be more useful in quantum computing as you get two bits polarity and spin. Or high density storage.
But who knows. There are clever physicists out there that know a lot more about this. They presumably see many more possibilities then I do. If the effect can be interrupted you could stitch between states. Like turning a magnet on and off. That would have uses like you described.
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Thank you. That was explained very well!
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How do you control the spin of an electron?
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I know the usual way uses oscillating magnetic fields and it being very cold. There are other ways i'm not familiar with. I'm a classical computer engineer not a quantum computer engineer. I'm more used to energy bandgap then spin control.
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Interesting… so like, if one were to use it on magnetic storage, you’d theoretically be able to work in quaternary?
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Yup
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Sorta like linear vs. circular polarization in radio transmissions?
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In the sense that it's two different but similar states.
I'm pretty sure we can say it's not actually spin now. Electrons have a charge and a magnetic field. If they are charged and spinning that world generate a magnetic field. So spin was used to describe the orientation of the field. The name for the state stuck
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While it is true Kramer outed himself as a degenerate at the smile factory in philadelphia I don't believe this is an appropriate place to bring it up.
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There was a second?
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I have no idea about the numbering, but I know of at least
- Ferromagnetism (like a fridge magnet)
- Antiferromagnetism (opposite of ferromagnetism at an atomic level)
- Diamagnetism (makes superconductors float)
- Paramagnetism (like that spinny frog)
These all indicate how a material reacts to a magnetic field. This article discusses "altermagnetism", which is somewhere between ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism.
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Fucking magnets, how do they work?
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Unironically, magnetism is similar to charge, which is similar to mass.
You (probably) wouldn't ask "But why does an atom weigh anything?" or "why do opposite charges attract?" All these things are just intrinsic properties of matter: they just have them.
So the answer to questions regarding why anything has mass/charge/magnetic moment really come down to "they just do."
Now, if you want to talk about how and why magnets work at a macroscopic scale, we can have a long and interesting chat about long range ordering and phase transitions, but I'll leave that for now :)
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There's a lot more to it than "they just do" we just don't know yet because there's actually a lot we don't understand about the fundamental properties of, well, fundamental particles.
See the higgs boson as for why matter has mass. We used to say "inertia is a property of matter" but some clever fucks figured out why and then proved it.
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In addition to "they just do", the answer is also "we don't know." In that sense, icp was right.
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This reminded me of Richard Feynman talking about this very topic. Always enjoy rewatching it.
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When I was much younger, I asked my dad why things obeyed the laws of physics. That seems similar to your questions in the second paragraph.
Still haven't gotten a satisfactory answer.
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Water, fire, air and dirt
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don't wanna talk to a scientist
Y'all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed.
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Is it animal magnetism?
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I'm too stupid to understand what that article is talking about. Can someone translate to layman's terms?
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I could be wrong but as I understand it. You know magnetism based on positive and negative poles, now they can read and write SPIN, which is another property of electrons (that are in everything, even things nonmagnetic). If it's true, and scales, we could use non-ferrous better materials to achieve what we do currently with ferrous materials.
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Can i make a ufo out of this?
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Worth a read, I feel like I read some hard sci-fi.
61 comments