this is an extremely esoteric thing - no net magnetism, but has some possibly-useful properties of atomic spin... useful if you're doing some spintronics, that is. maybe.
If I'm reading this right, then the real big benefit of these things would be solid state magnetic storage.
The benefit of these things is they don't create a magnetic field while they do respond to magnetic fields. That means you can pretty tightly pack these things together without concern that they'll interact with each other. A light electric pulse could determine if the bit is a 1 or a zero and a strong pulse would flip the bit.
I'm guessing that due to this nature, these things would actually have pretty long shelf lives and near infinite read/write cycles since you are, effectively, just flipping atoms around and not actually breaking structures or dumping in charge.
These should mostly work with regular silicon manufacturing. The tricky part will be how tightly you can pack these things together before the reading structures start interfering with each other.
The article does a decent job eventually of explaining a use-case in the section "Confirming that altermagnets exist".
Seems you can store information at high density in electron spin in materials where spins are naturally organized. However, so far the only suitable materials have been ferromagnets, which have macroscopic magnetic fields that make using them a nightmare. The new altermagnets have suitably organized spins but the atoms alternate their magnetic fields so there is no net magnetism from the material and they are easier to work with.
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* Czech Science Foundation
* The Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic
* European Research Council
* Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation)
> In a paper that hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, he and his colleagues predict the existence of yet another kind of magnetism, which he calls antialtermagnetism.
Can we stop referring to ArXiv papers third way? And for the love of God, just link the fucking abstract, never NEVER link the html![0] You just change {html,pdf} -> abs
We shouldn't say "not peer reviewed" because it isn't accurate. Being published in a journal doesn't mean a work is correct nor does it mean peers read it. Putting the paper on ArXiv does mean peers are reviewing it. The point of publishing is to communicate our work to others and journals and conferences can often be harmful to that process, making researchers oversell or even avoid looking in certain directions because a few opinionated peers shoot them down. It's happened to Nobel level works too.
The review process is just fucked up. It might be able to tell you if a paper is wrong but it can't tell you if it has no mistakes or is right. I mean it took two years to confirm this one, right? (Physical validation) but the way we say "hasn't been peer reviewed" implies that if it has been published in a journal then it's factual. That's not how it works and frankly that's not how it should work.
On top of that they take money from the government, gets articles for free, don't pay reviewers (meaning the universities pay for reviewers), and have the audacity to charge people to read that work. It's basically just a scheme to extract government money.
Sorry, I really just hate the publication process. It stifles innovation and wastes so many people's time
"However, researchers tend to feel that these clever tricks may not lead to scalable altermagnets anytime soon, as the methods are difficult to pull off."
This is a good scientific discovery, if replicated, but the hype drowns out the science.
Analogous beliefs about new RAM models up-ending the market for memory turned out to be far slower to hit the streets, and had far less impact on the DRAM market.
I would love to have something at modern memory speed, which behaved like core: Turn off the machine, its run-state is frozen. Turn back on, the memory state is still there.
But the reality is that machines are built to DRAM, and DRAM persists as the basic memory model for the "architecture" of a system
Doesn't this imply a 4th type with alternating rotated atoms and aligned magnetic spin? Also seems like you could mix and match (making the effect continuously tunable at macro scale).
I like how the headline makes it sound like we may have had an explosion of new magnet types for a while, and then that stopped for nearly a century. :D
> One of Šmejkal’s favourite pieces is Horseman, a striking picture that features an elaborate, tessellating series of mounted figures. Strangely enough, it was this piece that inspired him to predict the existence of an entirely new kind of magnetism.
I find it a little annoying that they don't show the actual artwork (although they do link to a page with it[0]), and give a description that does not really capture what the image conveys. Because upon seeing it, it immediately becomes obvious how that might inspire someone who thinks about electromagnetic fields all day. Well, obvious to people with some passing familiarity with electromagnetic fields at least.
I'm assuming copyright got in the way but even then they could have added an equivalent illustration of their own.
> In 2024, researchers led by Atasi Chakraborty, a member of Šmejkal’s research group, demonstrated that applying compressive strain to rhenium dioxide – long known to be an antiferromagnet – triggers a transition into an altermagnetic state.
> What’s more, a trio of researchers at the Beijing Institute of Technology in China realised that you can also create the right internal magnetic disturbances by stacking an antiferromagnet between layers of a different material, like a sandwich.
Does anyone else find it odd that they do not name the authors of the paper[0] that showed the second discovery? (Yichen Liu, Junxi Yu, and Cheng-Cheng Liu, for the record).
25 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 51.1 ms ] threadhttps://archive.ph/ObokU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altermagnetism
this is an extremely esoteric thing - no net magnetism, but has some possibly-useful properties of atomic spin... useful if you're doing some spintronics, that is. maybe.
If I'm reading this right, then the real big benefit of these things would be solid state magnetic storage.
The benefit of these things is they don't create a magnetic field while they do respond to magnetic fields. That means you can pretty tightly pack these things together without concern that they'll interact with each other. A light electric pulse could determine if the bit is a 1 or a zero and a strong pulse would flip the bit.
I'm guessing that due to this nature, these things would actually have pretty long shelf lives and near infinite read/write cycles since you are, effectively, just flipping atoms around and not actually breaking structures or dumping in charge.
These should mostly work with regular silicon manufacturing. The tricky part will be how tightly you can pack these things together before the reading structures start interfering with each other.
Seems you can store information at high density in electron spin in materials where spins are naturally organized. However, so far the only suitable materials have been ferromagnets, which have macroscopic magnetic fields that make using them a nightmare. The new altermagnets have suitably organized spins but the atoms alternate their magnetic fields so there is no net magnetism from the material and they are easier to work with.
* Czech Science Foundation * The Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic * European Research Council * Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation)
We shouldn't say "not peer reviewed" because it isn't accurate. Being published in a journal doesn't mean a work is correct nor does it mean peers read it. Putting the paper on ArXiv does mean peers are reviewing it. The point of publishing is to communicate our work to others and journals and conferences can often be harmful to that process, making researchers oversell or even avoid looking in certain directions because a few opinionated peers shoot them down. It's happened to Nobel level works too.
The review process is just fucked up. It might be able to tell you if a paper is wrong but it can't tell you if it has no mistakes or is right. I mean it took two years to confirm this one, right? (Physical validation) but the way we say "hasn't been peer reviewed" implies that if it has been published in a journal then it's factual. That's not how it works and frankly that's not how it should work.
On top of that they take money from the government, gets articles for free, don't pay reviewers (meaning the universities pay for reviewers), and have the audacity to charge people to read that work. It's basically just a scheme to extract government money.
Sorry, I really just hate the publication process. It stifles innovation and wastes so many people's time
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.01607
This is a good scientific discovery, if replicated, but the hype drowns out the science.
I would love to have something at modern memory speed, which behaved like core: Turn off the machine, its run-state is frozen. Turn back on, the memory state is still there.
But the reality is that machines are built to DRAM, and DRAM persists as the basic memory model for the "architecture" of a system
It reminds me of the "new state of matter discovered" kinds of articles that are known to get clicks.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%22new%2...
And also the "vantablack" fad:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=vantabla...
Basically, any potential discovery that can barely fit the "new kind of..." usually sounds more impressive than it really is.
This article is full of it.
I'm a programmer with very basic knowledge of magnetism, so, I can't say for sure what the discovery means, or if it is a discovery at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0st_6sE7Bk
I find it a little annoying that they don't show the actual artwork (although they do link to a page with it[0]), and give a description that does not really capture what the image conveys. Because upon seeing it, it immediately becomes obvious how that might inspire someone who thinks about electromagnetic fields all day. Well, obvious to people with some passing familiarity with electromagnetic fields at least.
I'm assuming copyright got in the way but even then they could have added an equivalent illustration of their own.
[0] https://escherinhetpaleis.nl/en/about-escher/escher-today/ho...
[1] https://www.nga.gov/artworks/54229-horseman (alternate link in case the first one doesn't load)
> What’s more, a trio of researchers at the Beijing Institute of Technology in China realised that you can also create the right internal magnetic disturbances by stacking an antiferromagnet between layers of a different material, like a sandwich.
Does anyone else find it odd that they do not name the authors of the paper[0] that showed the second discovery? (Yichen Liu, Junxi Yu, and Cheng-Cheng Liu, for the record).
[0] https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.13...