All the magnets you have ever interacted with, such as the tchotchkes stuck to your refrigerator door, are magnetic for the same reason. But what if there were another, stranger way to make a material magnetic?
In 1966, the Japanese physicist Yosuke Nagaoka conceived of a type of magnetism produced by a seemingly unnatural dance of electrons within a hypothetical material. Now, a team of physicists has spotted a version of Nagaoka’s predictions playing out within an engineered material only six atoms thick.
The discovery, recently published in the journal Nature, marks the latest advance in the five-decade hunt for Nagaoka ferromagnetism, in which a material magnetizes as the electrons within it minimize their kinetic energy, in contrast to traditional magnets. “That’s why I’m doing this kind of research: I get to learn things that we didn’t know before, see things that we haven’t seen before,” said study co-author Livio Ciorciaro, who completed the work while a doctoral candidate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich’s Institute for Quantum Electronics.
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