Sounds really cool, but I didn't understand one bit of it
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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the headlines about this are absolute dogshit and just fucking not true, they didn't discover a "third form of magnetism", they discovered a third kind of magnetic material.
I haven't read about it in detail, but from what i can gather it's like how things can be polarized in different ways, so imagine we only knew of linearly polarized light and just discovered circular polarization, basically.
it's still just electromagnetism, but With Context
Ah, that was much easier to understand.
Thank you!
“Altermagnetic materials, first theorized in 2022, have a structure that sits somewhere in between. Each individual magnetic moment points in the opposite direction as its neighbor, as in an antiferromagnetic material. But each unit is slightly twisted relative to this adjacent magnetic atom, resulting in some ferromagnetic-like properties.
Altermagnets, therefore, combine the best properties of both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic materials. "The benefit of ferromagnets is that we have an easy way of reading and writing memory using these up or down domains," study co-author Alfred Dal Din, a doctoral student also at the University of Nottingham, told Live Science. "But because these materials have a net magnetism, that information is also easy to lose by wiping a magnet over it."”