The existence of a new kind of magnet has been confirmed

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2417255-the-existence-of-a-new-kind-of-magnetism-has-been-confirmed/

by revicon • 2 years ago

329 91 2 years ago

newscientist.com

nonrandomstring2• 2 years ago

Whatever happened to "bubble memory"?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory

wk_end• 2 years ago

Your own link tells you!

  The introduction of dramatically faster semiconductor memory chips pushed
  bubble into the slow end of the scale, and equally dramatic improvements in
  hard-drive capacity made it uncompetitive in price terms.[1] Bubble memory was
  used for some time in the 1970s and 1980s in applications where its non-moving
  nature was desirable for maintenance or shock-proofing reasons. The
  introduction of flash storage and similar technologies rendered even this niche
  uncompetitive, and bubble disappeared entirely by the late 1980s.

masspro• 2 years ago

There was a Konami arcade cabinet that (tried to) use bubble memory! It was considered a failure. Also from Wikipedia[0]:

It was considerably more expensive than ROM chip-based boards and extremely sensitive to electromagnetic fields that could render the game unplayable.

You can find the start-up sequence of these on YouTube. It’s pretty…idiosyncratic. It took forever because it had to physically warm the memory up. Though I guess taking forever is irrelevant if you are turning on a machine only once in the morning. In fact, the music in the ROM it plays while starting up was named “Morning Music”.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_System

mewpmewp2• 2 years ago

Likely ruined by the reputation of bubble sort.

m463• 2 years ago

went the way of the stringy floppy

Aardwolf• 2 years ago

Also, MRAM, PRAM and FeRAM

the8472• 2 years ago

MRAM is available as a niche product, it just hasn't achieved the promise of being cheap and dense as dram, fast as sram, nonvolatile and higher write endurance than flash at the same time. It ticks maybe two or three of those boxes, which is still something.

pugworthy• 2 years ago

Magnets - We thought we knew how they worked.

adamhartenz• 2 years ago

Anyone who claims they know how magnets work, are a liar

archgoon• 2 years ago

Strong words. Why do you believe no one knows how magnets work? What would be a satisfactory answer?

javajosh• 2 years ago

I think you misunderstand the sentiment. You can know how they work; you cannot know why they work.

malodyets• 2 years ago

Physics answers what and how. Why is for philosophers and theologians.

dylan6042• 2 years ago

Magnets are part of the Elves technology. That's why there's a magnetic North Pole. So, we do know how they work...magic of Christmas

chasil5• 2 years ago

James Clerk Maxwell is a liar?

Are you telling me that this is not true?

∆ • B = 0

EDIT: See? Right there on the tin.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations

EDIT2: The meaning of this statement is that the sum of magnetic lines of force entering a frame is equal to those exiting; there are no magnetic monopoles.

chasil5• 2 years ago

I have upvoted you, and I don't think that you should be punished for what you have said.

There are ways that it is wrong, and ways that it is right.

...if you had said "why?" and not "how?" then you would be absolutely right.

yakshaving_jgt• 2 years ago

Somebody get ICP on the phone this instant.

whyenot• 2 years ago

What is ICP?

tabtab• 2 years ago

The Orange Man was right!

dylan6042• 2 years ago

Yes, I thought it was the Covid vaccine that made people magnetic

jfengel• 2 years ago

We do. This is just a different way to build one. It's a configuration of atoms that we didn't realize could be made stable, and their atom-level magnets line up in a novel way. We understand atomic magnetism pretty well.

altruios• 2 years ago

article limit paywall: any workaround?

davideg• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/m1qfh

gary_0• 2 years ago

This works for me: https://web.archive.org/web/20240215162623/https://www.newsc...

SequoiaHope• 2 years ago

Here's a nice non-paywalled article on this:

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-altermagnetism-experimentally....

Nevermark• 2 years ago

Spintronics, which these magnets might be useful for, have several potential advantages for low power, speed and quantum coherence for quantum computing.

So a very nice discovery. Love how we keep finding strange new useful modes of matter at “the bottom”.

Computing substrates are far from reaching any kind of final form or limit.

angiosperm• 2 years ago

I thought we had long since established that magnetism is illusory, an artifact of special relativity.

But it seems like a thin film of this stuff would be a good thing to skim an electron beam over, if you wanted some extremely short-waved photons.

pdonis7• 2 years ago

It's not illusory or an "artifact", since you can have electromagnetic field configurations that cannot be reduced to simple electrostatics (i.e., electric field but zero magnetic field) by picking an appropriate frame.

Special relativity helps to explain why, even if you have a configuration that is purely electrostatic in one frame, it won't be purely electrostatic in other frames. But that's not the same as saying that all electromagnetic field configurations are that way. They aren't.

AnimalMuppet• 2 years ago

The magnetic field may be an artifact of special relativity. Magnetic materials are not relativistic artifacts.

chasil5• 2 years ago

The electromagnetic force is one of the four fundamental forces.

It cannot be reduced.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_interaction

ithkuil• 2 years ago

I think GP alluded to

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duality_(electricity_and_mag...

lupire2• 2 years ago

Why isn't electricity an illusory artifact of relativistic magnetism?

pdonis7• 2 years ago

The article's title is misleading: they actually mean a new kind of permanent magnet (that was theoretically predicted but hadn't been observed until now), not a new kind of magnetism (as in, something not predicted or accounted for by our existing theory of electromagnetism).

dang• 2 years ago

Ok, we've downgraded magnetism to just a magnet in the title above. Thanks!

nhatcher• 2 years ago

If I am reading correctly it is a new kind of magnetism:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetism#Types

And I am not sure it can be called a magnet. It's definitely a new kind of magnetic state

purpleflame1257• 2 years ago

Yeah, for a minute there I thought they had found the monopole

db48x2• 2 years ago

Monopoles are already accounted for though, because they’re explicitly ruled out by the character and form of the laws of electromagnetism. ∇⋅B = 0, or “the divergence of the magnetic field is zero”.

EvgeniyZh• 2 years ago

I'd say that, for example, paramagnetism is kind of magnetism, not kind of magnet.

pdonis7• 2 years ago

I agree that one could say that, but it still only makes sense in a context where you have an object that has this kind of magnetism, i.e., a magnet. And the same is true of the "magnetism" whose discovery this article is describing: it's a kind of magnetic state of an object.

ddingus• 2 years ago

I was looking for the same and hot the paywall.

z2h-a6n• 2 years ago

As a condensed matter physicist (working in the same field but not on altermagnetism specifically), I would say this is being much more picky about the language than most people in the field tend to be. Moreover, I'm not sure you're even right about the language.

You are correct that this doesn't involve any changes to our understanding of electromagnetism in general; whether or not that means that altermagnetism is not a new type of magnetism is a matter of semantics. If I read in a paper or heard in a seminar that "altermagnetism is a new type of magnetism", I would not quibble with the language, though that phrase by itsself is almost tautologically pointless.

If you want a more technically meaningful phrase, I would propose that altermagnetism is a newly-discoved "magnetically ordered phase". Of course that doesn't fit so well in a headline.

pdonis7• 2 years ago

I would say this is being much more picky about the language than most people in the field tend to be.

Perhaps, but I think that when communicating with the public (as opposed to communicating with other physicists), "a new kind of magnetism" suggests something that isn't explained by our current theories, not just something that our existing theories predict but hadn't been observed before.

sesm• 2 years ago

altermagnetism is a newly-discoved "magnetically ordered phase"

I would prefer this headline.

lanza• 2 years ago

Sounds like shorthand terminology in your subfield is okay with the usage of "magnetism." But that's local slang, as a (former) high energy theorist I interpret the phrase "a new form of magnetism" as a new gauge theory or something equally spectacular. So I just rolled my eyes at the headline.

Suppafly• 2 years ago

As someone who isn't a physicist, headlines like this make me think they discovered magnets that work with some non-ferrous material, which would be amazing. But then I was like "wouldn't that be crazy" and then came to the comments specifically to see what the actual explanation would be.

_obviously• 2 years ago

Spintronic effects is how Saturn is a natural, planet-sized computer.

rashkov• 2 years ago

Go on…

CarRamrod• 2 years ago

OK Saturn, play Thick As A Brick on Earth at 100% volume

demondemidi2• 2 years ago

Is that from a book? I’d like to read it if so.

DeathArrow• 2 years ago

So in the future Arm vs x86 flame wars will be replaced by spintronic vs quantum vs carbon vs optical computers flame wars.

doublerabbit• 2 years ago

Does this enable hover-boot, hover-tech capabilities yet?

The existence of a new kind of magnet has been confirmed

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