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The existence of a new kind of magnetism has been confirmed (www.newscientist.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] threelonmusketeers 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The property [altermagnetism] could boost the storage on computer hard drives, because commercial devices contain ferromagnetic material that is so tightly packed that the material’s external magnetic fields start to see interference – altermagnets could be packed more densely.

I'm not clear on how such a drive would work. Aren't the material's external magnetic fields necessary in order to be able to "read" the data?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I'm guessing they're handwaving away bit detection as a problem to solve later. That's not unreasonable for basic research purposes, really; you could imagine other ways of reading the spin of atoms might be possible.

The original research cited is written in a pretty inaccessible way, so I can't really comment on the usefulness as a store of information yet.