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 coauthor Livio Ciorciaro, who completed the work while a doctoral candidate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich’s Institute for Quantum Electronics.

    • dinckel@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I’m fascinated by people like this. Took people with incomprehensible intelligence 60 years of research, to prove theories in new research, and someone on the internet goes “egh I already knew about it”

  • Mango@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    This is probably a huge deal. The Hyundai uniwheel is pretty enormous. A whole new mechanical motion! New magnetism properties might open up some crazy avenues of innovation!