from Hacker News

The existence of a new kind of magnet has been confirmed

by revicon on 2/15/24, 4:12 PM with 95 comments

  • by pdonis on 2/16/24, 2:48 AM

    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).

  • by Nevermark on 2/16/24, 12:46 AM

    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.

  • by TaylorAlexander on 2/16/24, 12:12 AM

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

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

  • by nonrandomstring on 2/15/24, 11:42 PM

    Whatever happened to "bubble memory"?

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

  • by DeathArrow on 2/16/24, 8:04 AM

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

  • by doublerabbit on 2/16/24, 1:46 PM

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

  • by altruios on 2/15/24, 11:57 PM

    article limit paywall: any workaround?

  • by pugworthy on 2/15/24, 11:45 PM

    Magnets - We thought we knew how they worked.

  • by _obviously on 2/16/24, 3:05 AM

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

  • by angiosperm on 2/16/24, 2:41 AM

    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.