Fractal patterns can be found throughout the snowflakes Electricity For the irregular edges of the coasts. Beautiful in appearance, their recurring nature inspires mathematical visions of the chaos of the landscape.
A new example of these mathematical quirks has been found in a type of magnetic material called spin ice, and it may help better understand how a strange behavior called magnetic monopoles emerges from its unstable structure.
Spins are magnetic crystals subject to structural rules similar to those of water ice, with unique interactions governed by the spin of their electrons rather than the push and pull of charges. As a result of this process, they do not have a low energy state with little activity. Instead, they buzz loudly even at very low temperatures.
From this quantum entanglement arises a strange phenomenon: properties that behave like magnets with only one pole. Even if it’s not entirely imaginary magnetic monopolar particles Some physicists think that perhaps they behave similarly in nature, which makes them worth studying.
So an international team of researchers recently turned their attention to an ice spiral called dysprosium titanate. When small amounts of heat are applied to matter, its normal magnetic laws are disrupted and the north and south poles separate and operate separately, resulting in a monopole.
many years ago A team of researchers has identified distinct unipolar magnetic activity in the quantum perturbation of the spinning ice of dysprosium titanate, but the results leave some questions about the exact nature of these unipolar motions.
In this follow-up study, the physicists realized that monopolies don’t move Total freedom in three dimensions. Instead, they were constrained to a 2.53-dimensional plane within a standard grid.
Scientists have built complex atomic-level models to demonstrate that unipolar motion is arranged in an interwoven pattern that is erased and rewritten depending on previous conditions and motions.
“When we injected it into our models, the fractures appeared almost immediately.” says physicist Jonathan Hallon from the University of Cambridge.
“The swirling formations form a network through which the monopolies must pass. The network branches into a segment of the right size.
This dynamic behavior explains why traditional tests previously did not have fractions. It was the hype that arose around the monopolies that finally revealed what they were really doing and the fractal pattern they were following.
“We knew something really weird was going on.” says the physicist Claudio Castelnovo from the University of Cambridge, England. The results of 30 years of studies are not included.
“After many failed attempts to explain the noise results, we finally get our eureka moment, realizing that monotony doesn’t move freely in three dimensions as has always been assumed, but rather lives in a fractal world.”
These kinds of advances are leading to incremental changes in the possibilities of science and how we can use materials like spin ice: perhaps spintronicsA growing field of study that could provide the next general improvement in the electronics we use today.
“In addition to explaining many puzzling experimental results that have long challenged us, the discovery of a mechanism for the emergence of a new type of fractal has led to a completely unexpected trajectory of unusual motion occurring in three dimensions.” says theoretical physicist Roderich Mossner of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany.
Published in the thesis Science.
