[HN Gopher] Altermagnets: The first new type of magnet in nearly...
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Altermagnets: The first new type of magnet in nearly a century
Related: https://phys.org/news/2024-02-altermagnetism-magnetism-
broad..., https://www.ictp.it/news/2025/1/altermagnets-new-
magnetic-ph...
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 252 points
Date : 2025-07-16 15:11 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newscientist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newscientist.com)
| neonate wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250716005935/https://www.newsc...
|
| https://archive.ph/ObokU
| nailer wrote:
| If the anti/alter difference is not obvious the first time you
| see
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250716153436im_/https://images...
| look at the halo around each magnet.
| vpribish wrote:
| that article reads like an internet recipe SEO honeypot.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altermagnetism
|
| this is an extremely esoteric thing - no net magnetism, but has
| some possibly-useful properties of atomic spin... useful if
| you're doing some spintronics, that is. maybe.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| After reading that article I now understand what my boomer
| parents felt like watching star trek for the first time.
|
| "In condensed matter physics, altermagnetism is a type of
| persistent magnetic state in ideal crystals. Altermagnetic
| structures are collinear and crystal-symmetry compensated,
| resulting in zero net magnetisation. Unlike in an ordinary
| collinear antiferromagnet, another magnetic state with zero net
| magnetization, the electronic bands in an altermagnet are not
| Kramers degenerate, but instead depend on the wavevector in a
| spin-dependent way due to the intrinsic crystal symmetry
| connecting different magnetic sublattices."
| abtinf wrote:
| The writing on Wikipedia science and math articles tends to
| be absolutely indecipherable trash.
|
| Trecknobabble often makes more sense than Wikipedia, at least
| within the context of the show.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| As someone formerly in the sciences, I can't suspend my
| disbelief long enough to make it through a treknobabble
| explanation, it's just cheesy enough where it's painful.
| Though I think trash to describe a lot of science and math
| wiki articles is a bit of a strong word. A lot of them are
| written by the practitioners or people with intimate
| knowledge so I'd 100% expect jargon so it can be
| impenetrable at times, that's where the references come in
| handy: textbooks, articles and whatnot. A bit opaque yes,
| but not trash.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Not trash as in wrong but trash in utterly useless.
|
| If you have enough knowledge to understand the article
| then you don't need it because you understand the field.
| If you don't it's impenetrable.
|
| Perhaps I'm wrong: are there people out there who learnt
| something from a Wikipedia page on maths because you fell
| between the two?
| srcnkcl wrote:
| Reads like Turbo Encabulator... maybe on purpose?
| boothby wrote:
| As somebody with a professional interest in spin lattices:
| no, it doesn't. (Also: I'm unfamiliar with the term
| "Kramers degenerate" and am reading up now)
| LearnYouALisp wrote:
| Honestly I feel it should read "Kramers-degenerate" if it
| doesn't already
| MengerSponge wrote:
| This makes me want to write a conference talk "Towards a
| turbo encabulator"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator
| Timsky wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this piece!
| rockskon wrote:
| Can it be used to supply inverse reactive current for use in
| unilateral phase detractors while also being capable of
| automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters?
| bigbuppo wrote:
| Well of course, that's why it needs Glyptal-impregnated,
| cyanoethylated kraft paper bushings. But use caution. The
| replenerative flow characteristics of positive ions in
| unilateral phase detractors may require the use of a
| quasistatic regeneration oscillator in some situations.
| legohead wrote:
| "the crystal structure results in zero magnetisation."
|
| ?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The crystal emits no magnetism as a whole, despite the
| different internal states it can take, because adjacent
| atoms cancel each other out.
|
| Because each half of the net-zero magnet is arranged
| differently inside the crystal there's still a good way to
| measure what state it's in. Or something like that, I can
| see the pretty graph but I don't know what measurement
| you'd do.
| WalterBright wrote:
| That would be TNG. The original Star Trek didn't use <insert
| technobabble here> in the scripts.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| > "In condensed matter physics, altermagnetism is a type of
| persistent magnetic state in ideal crystals.
|
| Real crystals have impurities so they are harder to reason
| about. An ideal crystal is just one where we pretend it's
| perfect.
|
| > Altermagnetic structures are collinear
|
| The structure is lined up, like the diagrams in the article
|
| > and crystal-symmetry compensated, resulting in zero net
| magnetisation.
|
| And the alternating lines are symmetrical so they
| "compensate" for each other and cancel out.
|
| > the electronic bands in an altermagnet are not Kramers
| degenerate... (etc.)
|
| The spin is different like in the diagram. Ok, that's a bit
| lame. Anyone else can give a simple but mostly accurate
| explanation?
| cogman10 wrote:
| Ah, neat.
|
| If I'm reading this right, then the real big benefit of these
| things would be solid state magnetic storage.
|
| The benefit of these things is they don't create a magnetic field
| while they do respond to magnetic fields. That means you can
| pretty tightly pack these things together without concern that
| they'll interact with each other. A light electric pulse could
| determine if the bit is a 1 or a zero and a strong pulse would
| flip the bit.
|
| I'm guessing that due to this nature, these things would actually
| have pretty long shelf lives and near infinite read/write cycles
| since you are, effectively, just flipping atoms around and not
| actually breaking structures or dumping in charge.
|
| These should mostly work with regular silicon manufacturing. The
| tricky part will be how tightly you can pack these things
| together before the reading structures start interfering with
| each other.
| imdsm wrote:
| > A light electric pulse could determine if the bit is a 1 or a
| zero and a strong pulse would flip the bit.
|
| Feynman moment. Breaking it down into one sentence. Bravo!
| pedro_caetano wrote:
| > If I'm reading this right, then the real big benefit of these
| things would be solid state magnetic storage.
|
| Wouldn't this also enable a much higher resolution and better
| noise immunity for the entire zoo of industry sensors that are
| based on the Hall effect?
| foota wrote:
| Note that you can actually flip the magnetic field of certain
| "normal" magnetic materials:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-022-01354-7
| jasonthorsness wrote:
| The article does a decent job eventually of explaining a use-case
| in the section "Confirming that altermagnets exist".
|
| Seems you can store information at high density in electron spin
| in materials where spins are naturally organized. However, so far
| the only suitable materials have been ferromagnets, which have
| macroscopic magnetic fields that make using them a nightmare. The
| new altermagnets have suitably organized spins but the atoms
| alternate their magnetic fields so there is no net magnetism from
| the material and they are easier to work with.
| searine wrote:
| Brought to you by the Tax Payers of Czechia, Germany, and the EU
| via :
|
| * Czech Science Foundation * The Ministry of Education of the
| Czech Republic * European Research Council * Deutsche
| Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation)
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Which raises the question -- Norway famously made its citizen
| fund using oil money, but which country has made the most for
| it's citizens from [technology] IP?
|
| Natural resources v IP resources?
| elictronic wrote:
| Norway basically. Nearly every other country just throws the
| money back into the general fund or accumulates it at the
| top.
| godelski wrote:
| > In a paper that hasn't yet been peer-reviewed, he and his
| colleagues predict the existence of yet another kind of
| magnetism, which he calls antialtermagnetism.
|
| Can we stop referring to ArXiv papers third way? And for the love
| of God, just link the fucking abstract, never NEVER link the
| html![0] You just change {html,pdf} -> abs
|
| We shouldn't say "not peer reviewed" because it isn't accurate.
| Being published in a journal doesn't mean a work is correct nor
| does it mean peers read it. Putting the paper on ArXiv does mean
| peers are reviewing it. The point of publishing is to communicate
| our work to others and journals and conferences can often be
| harmful to that process, making researchers oversell or even
| avoid looking in certain directions because a few opinionated
| peers shoot them down. It's happened to Nobel level works too.
|
| The review process is just fucked up. It _might_ be able to tell
| you if a paper is wrong but it can 't tell you if it has no
| mistakes or is right. I mean it took two years to confirm this
| one, right? (Physical validation) but the way we say "hasn't been
| peer reviewed" implies that if it has been published in a journal
| then it's factual. That's not how it works and frankly that's not
| how it should work.
|
| On top of that they take money from the government, gets articles
| for free, don't pay reviewers (meaning the universities pay for
| reviewers), and have the audacity to charge people to read that
| work. It's basically just a scheme to extract government money.
|
| Sorry, I really just hate the publication process. It stifles
| innovation and wastes so many people's time
|
| [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.01607
| gus_massa wrote:
| Nitpicking:
|
| > _Putting the paper on ArXiv does mean peers are reviewing
| it._
|
| You can upload a pdf to the ArXiv and not send it to any
| journal. I think you need an invitation to create an account,
| but it's 99% like WordPress.
| mindcrime wrote:
| > I think you need an invitation to create an account,
|
| Anybody can create an account on arXiv.[1][2] However, having
| an account and uploading are different things. Strictly
| speaking, you have to be _endorsed_ to submit a paper. But
| _some_ endorsements are granted automatically, based on
| various criteria. So not everybody has to go explicitly ask
| people for an endorsement:
|
| _arXiv requires that users be endorsed before submitting
| their first paper to a category._
|
| _arXiv may give some people automatic endorsements based on
| subject area, topic, previous submissions, and academic
| affiliation. In most cases, automatic endorsement is given to
| authors from known academic institutions and research
| facilities._
|
| Generally speaking, the "word on the street" is that it's as
| simple as "register with a .edu email address and you get
| auto endorsed, otherwise you don't." But I _think_ the
| reality is slightly more complex than that. Although the
| exact details are kept private, probably at least in part to
| prevent people from gaming the system.
|
| Note that the page encourages you to register with an
| "institutional" email address, but doesn't specifically say
| it has to be a .edu one.
|
| _arXiv submitters are therefore encouraged to associate an
| institutional email address, if they have one, with their
| arXiv account. This will expedite the endorsement process._
|
| [1]: https://info.arxiv.org/help/registerhelp.html
|
| [2]: https://arxiv.org/user/register
| godelski wrote:
| I think you're right to nitpick, but nitpicking the wrong
| thing. > and not send it to any journal.
|
| This, doesn't matter.
|
| The main point of my comment is "journal != peers reading the
| work". Which, of course, you could even say is true about
| ArXiv (fine to nitpick[0]). You can put on ArXiv and no one
| will read it or the only people who read it are not peers.
| You're right that submitting to a journal or conference
| (nearly) guarantees someone has read the paper.
|
| The thing though is "peer" is weakly defined. I recognize
| that it is contextually defined, but I'd hope from the
| context of my comment you can tell that I'm using "peer" to
| mean "another person well versed in the niche topic of the
| paper." This is different from "a person well versed in the
| topic of the paper." The niche matters. I explain more in
| this comment[1]
|
| Or to put it differently, just because someone read it
| doesn't mean they /read/ it.
|
| [0] I'll revise the quoted text to "Just because it is on
| ArXiv doesn't mean peers aren't or haven't reviewed it".
| Though we can nitpick a little more and say that if there are
| more than one author on the paper, a peer has been much more
| likely to have reviewed the work (not all co-authors review
| the works they are authors on...)
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44587535
| devmor wrote:
| > Being published in a journal doesn't mean a work is correct
| nor does it mean peers read it. Putting the paper on ArXiv does
| mean peers are reviewing it.
|
| Sorry I don't get what you mean by this. How does putting the
| paper on ArXiv mean that peers are reviewing it any more than
| publishing it in a journal? Both do mean that peers have the
| opportunity to review it, but neither guarantees it, and ArXiv
| is infinitely easier to upload anything to and never have it
| even looked at.
| xondono wrote:
| Technically speaking, being published means at least the
| editors have reviewed. The quality of their reviews is
| another thing entirely.
| godelski wrote:
| Well... it can be desk rejected. Which I've actually had
| happen because the paper was already on ArXiv, even though
| it wasn't against the journal's policy. Took 4 weeks to
| resolve and then got desk rejected again for "not citing
| the correct works", with no further information... I don't
| submit to that journal anymore...
| tensor wrote:
| Obviously journals vary in their standards, but many of the
| more respected ones do require other scientists read and
| critique the paper. You can argue about the quality of these
| reviews, certainly it's a process that needs improving, but
| this is what "peer reviewed" means.
|
| Trying to claim ArXiv papers are "peer reviewed" is utter
| nonsense. As you correctly point out, the only requirement to
| being on ArXiv is that someone with an account uploaded it
| there. There are no requirements that it passes any sort of
| verification or vetting process whatsoever, let alone having
| other scientists read and critique it.
|
| There is a very vocal movement these days that is trying to
| argue that we should do away with the traditional peer review
| process. Apparently that sometimes includes trying to
| redefine the very definition of "peer review" as the OP did.
| godelski wrote:
| You're right. You can publish into the void.
|
| I was hoping what was said would be easily interpreted but I
| was incorrect. I'll revise to "putting on ArXiv doesn't mean
| peers haven't reviewed it."
|
| For what constitutes "a peer", I describe more here[0]. The
| definition varies wildly, and it is not an easy problem to
| determine who is even qualified to review a work. Hell, it
| can be hard to determine if you yourself are qualified to
| review a work!
|
| While I advocate for mostly abandoning the journals and
| conferences (or dramatic restructuring), I won't act like
| there's no problems with just publishing to ArXiv (or more
| preferably, OpenReview, since it allows commenting). But the
| truth is that there's no globally optimal solution to this
| problem. I just think the benefits outweigh the costs here.
| Frankly, most authors aren't publishing (posting on ArXiv or
| whatever) in bad faith. If anything, I think our current
| system incentivizes bad faith publishing, but that's a larger
| conversation (coupled with this one but requires talking
| about a few other factors).
|
| Frankly, we just waste a lot of time and effort for little to
| no gain (possibly even for losses).
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44587535
| xondono wrote:
| That's because we've basically reinterpreted what "peer review"
| is.
|
| Peer review used to mean "some peers have reviewed it", mainly
| the editors, who pushed for correctness and novelty. There was
| a clear difference between publishing and making a paper
| public. It never meant "it's right", but it meant "it has
| passed basic quality control and it's worth your time to read
| it".
|
| Modern day academics push people to fragment into ever smaller
| niches, meaning most editors are nowadays completely out of
| their depth when evaluating papers, so now we keep referring to
| editor approval as "peer review" and try to diminish the public
| perception that comes with it.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| > That's because we've basically reinterpreted what "peer
| review" is.
|
| Who is "we" in this scenario? Because that's certainly not
| how I've seen peer review work.
|
| The editor would ask a small group of people in the field to
| act as reviewers and then send them the papers. They review
| it and send it back with any requests for changes prior to
| publication.
|
| So they're the peers that are reviewing, not the editor.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I think they meant "reinterpreted" over the last century,
| not over the span of your personal experience and career.
| tensor wrote:
| This is not true. In most of the top journals you need at
| least three other practitioners in your field to read it and
| sign off on it. The editor finds the appropriate reviewers,
| manages the process, does some basic format and other types
| of vetting, and also will accept or reject it based on the
| reviews from the reviewers.
|
| The reviewers here are the "peers", and generally are
| expected to be qualified experts in the area that the paper
| deals with.
| godelski wrote:
| > This is not true. In most of the top journals you need at
| least three other practitioners in your field to read it
| and sign off on it.
|
| You're misreading xondono as well as me. I think your idea
| of what peer review is (in practice) is too idealized.
|
| The problem is the word "expert". We're using it to mean
| different things, and the difference is important. Despite
| it appearing that way, "expert" is not a binary condition.
| It is a spectrum. Where along the spectrum requires context
| to determine the threshold. Ours (xondono, correct me if I
| misinterpreted), is higher than the one you're using.
|
| Finding appropriate reviewers is a non-trivial task, which
| is kinda the entire problem. You can have a PhD in machine
| learning and that does not mean you're qualified to review
| another machine learning paper. I know, because I've told
| ACs I'm not qualified for certain works!
|
| The problem is that what is being published is new
| knowledge. I'll refer to the (very _very_ short)
| "illustrated guide to a Ph.D." How many people are
| qualified to determine if that knowledge is new? It's
| probably a lot fewer than you think. Let's go back to ML.
| Let's say your PhD and all your work is in Vision
| Transformers. Does that mean you're qualified to evaluate a
| paper on diffusion models? Truth is, probably not. Hell,
| there's been papers I've reviewed where I'm literally 1 of
| 2 people in the world who are the appropriate reviewers
| (the other is the main author of the paper we wrote that's
| being extended).
|
| Hell, most people working on diffusion aren't even
| qualified to properly evaluate every diffusion paper!
| Here's a great example, where this work is more on the
| mathy side of diffusion models and you can look at the
| reviews[1]. Reviews are 6 (Weak Accept), 9 (Very Strong
| Accept), 8 (Strong Accept), 8, 6. Reviewer confidence was
| even low: 2, 4, 3, 3, 4, respectively (out of 5), and
| confidence is usually over stated.
|
| Mind you, this is the #1 ML conference and these reviews
| are post rebuttal. There were over 13000 people reviewing
| that year[2] and they couldn't get people who had 5/5
| confidence. This is even for a paper written by 2 top
| researchers at a top institution... > The
| reviewers here are the "peers", and generally are expected
| to be qualified experts in the area that the paper deals
| with.
|
| So no. They are "expert" when compared to the general
| public, but not necessarily "expert" in context to the
| paper being reviewed.
|
| I hope the physical evidence is enough to convince you,
| because honestly this is quite common and there's a viewing
| bias. Most of the time we don't have this data for works
| that were rejected. But there's plenty of works that were
| accepted that you can see this. Not to mention (as stated
| in my original comment), multiple extremely influential
| works (worthy of a Nobel Prize) have been rejected. Here's
| a pretty famous example, where it had both been rejected
| for being "too trivial" (twice) as well as "obviously
| incorrect."[3] Yet, it resulted in a Nobel and is one of
| the most cited works in the field. Doesn't sound like these
| reviews helped the paper become better, sounds more like it
| was just wasting time.
|
| [0] https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
|
| [1] https://openreview.net/forum?id=NnMEadcdyD
|
| [2] https://media.neurips.cc/Conferences/NeurIPS2024/NeurIP
| S2024...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons#Cri
| tical...
| godelski wrote:
| I pretty much agree with you but wanted to nitpick this part
| > mainly the editors, who pushed for correctness and novelty.
|
| I don't want to use the word correctness here[0], because no
| one checks if the work is correct. Rather, I'd say the goal
| is to check for wrongness. A peer reviewer cannot determine
| if a work is correct simply by reading it. The only way to do
| this is replication or by extension (which is the case of the
| work here. The physical verification was an extension of the
| earlier work). It's important to make this distinction
| because, as you say, it doesn't mean the work is right. Nor
| does it even mean the the readers think it is right.
|
| In the past, many journals published as long as they did not
| think there were serious errors and were not plagiarized.
| Editing is completely different, where we want to make sure
| works are communicated correctly.
|
| But I purposefully didn't say "novelty"
|
| It is a trash word that means nothing. The original intent
| was that work wasn't redone. That you can't go in and take
| credit for discovering something someone else did, which we'd
| cal plagiarism. You could change all the words and still
| plagiarize.
|
| It is VERY easy to find problems/limitations with works. All
| works have limitations. All works are incomplete. But are
| these reasons to reject? Often, no... You see the same thing
| on HN and it's a classic bias of STEM people. Hyperfixate on
| the issues. We're trained to, because that's the first step
| to solving problems! But that's not what matters in
| publishing, because we're not trying to solve all problems.
| We do it iteratively! It also runs counter to quickly
| publishing ("publish or perish") as what, you want to wait to
| publish till we got a grand theory of everything? And don't
| get me started on how bad we are at predicting impact of
| works and how impact often runs counter to the status quo
| (you can't paradigm shift by maintaining the paradigm). So we
| don't explore...
|
| AND very frequently, we DO NOT WANT novelty in science.
| Sounds strange, but it is * _critical*_ to science existing.
|
| - Our goal is to figure out how things work. The causal
| structure of things. So this means works need to be
| reproducible. We * _want*_ reproductions, but we also don 't
| want them ad infinitum.
|
| - We * _also*_ want to find other ways to derive the same
| thing. Some reviewers will consider this novel while others
| won 't, typically inversely related to their expertise in the
| field (more expert = more likely to consider novel while less
| expert means you can't see the nuanced differences which are
| important).
|
| This greatly stifles innovation and reduces how well papers
| communicate their ideas.
|
| The problem here is as we advance, nuances matter more and
| more. Think of it as with approximations. Calculating the
| first order term is usually computationally easy, with
| computation exponentially increasing as the order of accuracy
| increases. The nuances start to dominate. But by focusing on
| "novelty" (rather than plagiarism) we face the exact problem
| you mention. > most editors are nowadays
| completely out of their depth when evaluating papers,
|
| So authors end up just making their works look more
| convoluted, to look more impressive and make it look less
| like the work that they are building on top of. High experts
| can see right through this and as grad students usually groan
| but then just become accustomed to the shit and start doing
| the same thing. Because, non-niche experts cannot
| differentiate the work that's being built upon from the new
| work.
|
| It is a self-inflicted problem. As editors/reviewers we think
| we're doing right, but we're too dumb to see the minute (but
| important) differences. As authors we're just trying to get
| published, keep our jobs, and it's not exactly like the
| reviewers are "wrong". But it often just becomes a chase and
| does nothing to help make the papers actually better. This
| gets even worse with targeted acceptance rates, as it
| incentivizes reviewers to reject and be less nuanced. Which
| they're already incentivized to do because there's just so
| much stress and time crunch to the job anyways (including
| needing to rewrite papers because others did exactly this).
|
| The targeted acceptance rates are just silly and we see the
| absurdity in domains like Machine Learning[1]. We have an
| exponentially increasing number of papers to review each
| year. This isn't just because there are new works, but
| because works are being resubmitted. Most of these
| conferences have 30% acceptance rates but the number of
| "wrong" papers is not that low. We also know the acceptance
| rate is very noisy for the majority of papers, where a
| different set of reviewers would result in a different
| outcome (see the multiple "NeurIPS experiment"s). You can do
| an easy model to see why this is bad. It just leads to more
| papers and if the number of reviewers stays the same, this is
| more reviews that need to be done per reviewer, which just
| exacerbates the problem. If you have 1000 fixed papers
| submitted each year and even a low percent of rejected works
| resubmitting the next year, like 10%, you actually have to
| review ~1075 papers. With a more realistic ~50% of rejected
| works getting recycled, you need to actually review ~1500 per
| year. Most serious authors will try a few times, and it is a
| common to say "just keep trying".
|
| We don't have to do this to ourselves... It helps no one, and
| actually harms everyone. So... why? What are we gaining?
|
| It's just so fucking stupid
|
| /rant (have we even started?)
|
| [0] I'm pretty sure we're going to agree, but we're talking
| in public and want to make sure we communicate with the
| public. Tbh, even many scientists think "correctness" is the
| same as "is correct"
|
| [1] It is extra bad because the primary publishing venue is
| conferences. To you submit, get a review (usually 3), get to
| do a rebuttal (often 1 page max), and then the final decision
| is made. There is no real discussion so you have no real
| chance to explain things to near-niche experts. Worse with
| acceptance deadlines and overlapping deadlines between
| conferences. It is better in other domains since journals
| have conversations, but some of these problems still exist.
| Animats wrote:
| _" However, researchers tend to feel that these clever tricks may
| not lead to scalable altermagnets anytime soon, as the methods
| are difficult to pull off."_
|
| This is a good scientific discovery, if replicated, but the hype
| drowns out the science.
| dylan604 wrote:
| But that's different from a lot of announcements where after
| reading, you are left with the impression a viable product is
| right around the corner
| ggm wrote:
| Analogous beliefs about new RAM models up-ending the market for
| memory turned out to be far slower to hit the streets, and had
| far less impact on the DRAM market.
|
| I would love to have something at modern memory speed, which
| behaved like core: Turn off the machine, its run-state is frozen.
| Turn back on, the memory state is still there.
|
| But the reality is that machines are built to DRAM, and DRAM
| persists as the basic memory model for the "architecture" of a
| system
| codedokode wrote:
| You can save memory after turning the system off, and swap
| pages in after turning on.
| cgannett wrote:
| even if its not faster than DRAM I wonder at what point would
| it just not make sense to have two separate modules. Like all
| the volitile storage in a system could be in the L-cache/s on
| the CPU and for most things that plus this faster non-
| volitile storage would do the trick. I wonder what kind of
| optimizations would have been made in a world where stuff
| like DRAM just didnt exist and we just had to deal with the
| bottlenecks of non-volitile storage media
| coredog64 wrote:
| Sounds like the era when we mainly transitioned to solid
| state storage. When spinning rust was the primary
| technology and RAM prices were high, you could buy hybrid
| drives that had small amounts of solid state cache (mainly
| intended for common OS files). And even today, all but the
| cheapest SSDs will have onboard DRAM for better write
| speeds.
| program_whiz wrote:
| Doesn't this imply a 4th type with alternating rotated atoms and
| aligned magnetic spin? Also seems like you could mix and match
| (making the effect continuously tunable at macro scale).
| hammock wrote:
| Yea they mentioned it in the article. Antialtermagnetism
| eccentricwind wrote:
| If It's not all hype and hyperbole, It could be a massive
| breakthrough in data storage, but It's better to remain prudent
| and reserve some doubt.
| Chief_Searcha wrote:
| Yep that's pretty much my take on any scientific article. It's
| really hard to tell which of these things you'll hear about 10
| years down the line.
| alganet wrote:
| This is likely to be less important than it really is.
|
| It reminds me of the "new state of matter discovered" kinds of
| articles that are known to get clicks.
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%22new%2...
|
| And also the "vantablack" fad:
|
| https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=vantabla...
|
| Basically, any potential discovery that can barely fit the "new
| kind of..." usually sounds more impressive than it really is.
|
| This article is full of it.
|
| I'm a programmer with very basic knowledge of magnetism, so, I
| can't say for sure what the discovery means, or if it is a
| discovery at all.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| > _I 'm a programmer with very basic knowledge of magnetism,
| so, I can't say for sure what the discovery means, or if it is
| a discovery at all._
|
| Perhaps you should have lead with this.
| alganet wrote:
| I haven't said anything about magnetism. Read my comment
| again.
| throwanem wrote:
| So it's an entirely new kind of magnetism, altogether?
| jepj57 wrote:
| https://journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.12.04...
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