You are correct that this doesn't involve any changes to our understanding of electromagnetism in general; whether or not that means that altermagnetism is not a new type of magnetism is a matter of semantics. If I read in a paper or heard in a seminar that "altermagnetism is a new type of magnetism", I would not quibble with the language, though that phrase by itsself is almost tautologically pointless.
If you want a more technically meaningful phrase, I would propose that altermagnetism is a newly-discoved "magnetically ordered phase". Of course that doesn't fit so well in a headline.
Perhaps, but I think that when communicating with the public (as opposed to communicating with other physicists), "a new kind of magnetism" suggests something that isn't explained by our current theories, not just something that our existing theories predict but hadn't been observed before.
I would prefer this headline.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetism#Types
And I am not sure it can be called a magnet. It's definitely a new kind of magnetic state
Are you telling me that this is not true?
∆ • B = 0
EDIT: See? Right there on the tin.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell's_equations
EDIT2: The meaning of this statement is that the sum of magnetic lines of force entering a frame is equal to those exiting; there are no magnetic monopoles.
There are ways that it is wrong, and ways that it is right.
...if you had said "why?" and not "how?" then you would be absolutely right.
The introduction of dramatically faster semiconductor memory chips pushed
bubble into the slow end of the scale, and equally dramatic improvements in
hard-drive capacity made it uncompetitive in price terms.[1] Bubble memory was
used for some time in the 1970s and 1980s in applications where its non-moving
nature was desirable for maintenance or shock-proofing reasons. The
introduction of flash storage and similar technologies rendered even this niche
uncompetitive, and bubble disappeared entirely by the late 1980s.> It was considerably more expensive than ROM chip-based boards and extremely sensitive to electromagnetic fields that could render the game unplayable.
You can find the start-up sequence of these on YouTube. It’s pretty…idiosyncratic. It took forever because it had to physically warm the memory up. Though I guess taking forever is irrelevant if you are turning on a machine only once in the morning. In fact, the music in the ROM it plays while starting up was named “Morning Music”.
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.
Special relativity helps to explain why, even if you have a configuration that is purely electrostatic in one frame, it won't be purely electrostatic in other frames. But that's not the same as saying that all electromagnetic field configurations are that way. They aren't.
It cannot be reduced.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duality_(electricity_and_mag...
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.
https://phys.org/news/2024-02-altermagnetism-experimentally....