New discovery by scientists redefines magnetism
Enter a hidden world so small it’s almost unimaginable – at the nanoscale. Imagine a hair and shrink it a million times and you’ve got it. Here, atoms and molecules are the primary builders, creating hitherto undiscovered new properties.
University of Missouri College of Arts and Sciences researchers Deepak Singh and Carsten Ullrich and their team of students and postdocs recently made a breakthrough discovery at the nanoscale: the discovery of a new type of quasiparticle found in all magnetic materials, regardless of their magnetic properties. How strong or hot the material is.
These new properties upend researchers’ previous understanding of magnetism, showing that it is not as static as previously thought.
“We’ve all seen the bubbles that form in soda or other carbonated beverage products,” said Ulrich, the curator’s distinguished professor of physics and astronomy. “Qusiparticles are like those bubbles, and we found that they can move freely at very fast speeds.”
The discovery could help develop a new generation of electronics that are faster, smarter and more energy-efficient. But first, scientists need to determine how this discovery applies to these processes.
One area of science that could directly benefit from researchers’ discoveries is spintronics, or “spintronics.” Ulrich said that while traditional electronics uses the charge of electrons to store and process information, spintronics takes advantage of the electron’s natural spin – a property that is intrinsically linked to the electron’s quantum properties.
For example, cell phone batteries powered by spintronics can last hundreds of hours on a single charge, said Singer, an associate professor of physics and astronomy who specializes in spintronics.
“The spin properties of these electrons are responsible for the magnetic phenomena,” Singer said. “Electrons have two properties: charge and spin. So instead of using traditional charge, we use the spin or spin property. It’s more efficient because spin consumes much less energy than charge.”
Singer’s team, including former graduate student Jason Guo, conducted the experiments, leveraging Singer’s years of expertise in magnetic materials to improve their properties. Ulrich’s team, along with postdoctoral researcher Daniel Hill, analyzed Singer’s results and created models to explain the unique behavior they observed under Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s powerful spectrometer.
The current study builds on the team’s earlier research, published in nature communicationsthey reported this dynamic behavior at the nanoscale level for the first time.
“Emergent topological quasiparticle dynamics in shrinking nanomagnets” published in physical review researchJournal of the American Physical Society. This work was supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences (DE-SC0014461 and DE-SC0019109). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding agencies.
Guo is now a postdoctoral researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Hill and Guo are the first and second authors of the study. The University of Missouri researchers were joined by Oak Ridge scientists Valeria Lauter, Laura Stingaciu and Piotr Zolnierczuk.
2024-12-17 18:10:06