Speaker 1: Welcome to the quart Side. Quantum Physics Podcast, an exploration
Speaker 1: of the fundamental structure of reality, where quantum laws govern matter, energy,
Speaker 1: and information. Here, uncertainty is a feature, not a flaw,
Speaker 1: and understanding begins at the smallest scales.
Speaker 2: For exactly one hundred years, some of the brightest minds
Speaker 2: in the history of well human civilization have been staring
Speaker 2: at perfectly ordinary pieces of rock, completely blind to a
Speaker 2: superpower hiding inside them.
Speaker 3: Completely blind.
Speaker 2: And I really want you to picture that for a second.
Speaker 2: Generations of Nobel laureates, theoretical physicists, materials scientists, the people
Speaker 2: building the modern world, right, they were all constrained by
Speaker 2: this one set of rules about how magnetism works. It
Speaker 2: was foundational physics, like the kind of settled science you
Speaker 2: learn in high school and then you just never really
Speaker 2: question again.
Speaker 3: You just accept it because we believe there were two
Speaker 3: fundamental categories of magnetism, a very neat, very binary system.
Speaker 2: But it turns out the universe doesn't actually care about
Speaker 2: our neat little categories. We were basically wearing blinders this
Speaker 2: whole time.
Speaker 3: We really were. It is genuinely I mean, it's one
Speaker 3: of the most profound oversights in modern physics. Wow, because
Speaker 3: we are talking about materials that have literally been sitting
Speaker 3: on laboratory shells for decades. Scientists weighed them, they measured them,
Speaker 3: they ran currents through them, and categorize them is entirely mundane.
Speaker 2: Just totally boring.
Speaker 3: Rocks, exactly boring rocks. But because they were looking through
Speaker 3: this very specific century old mathematical lens, they missed the
Speaker 3: fact that these materials, which we now call alter magnets
Speaker 3: by the way, represent a massive third class of magnetism.
Speaker 2: A third class.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they don't just break the established rules of symmetry.
Speaker 3: They actually combined traits that we thought were well completely
Speaker 3: impossible to put together.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the real stakes of this conversation,
Speaker 2: I think, because we aren't just you know, uncovering a
Speaker 2: quirky historical footnote here, or like a piece of abstract
Speaker 2: math that only matters to academics.
Speaker 3: Oh no, not at all.
Speaker 2: Right, this massive blind spot we just uncovered, it happens
Speaker 2: to be the key to unlocking the post Silicon era.
Speaker 3: That's the real headline here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we are looking at the foundational architecture for devices
Speaker 2: that are a thousand times faster than the phone or
Speaker 2: the computer you're using right now.
Speaker 3: To listen to this a thousand times.
Speaker 2: Yes, we're looking at a path to incredible energy efficiency,
Speaker 2: something that could potentially save Moore's Law from basically the
Speaker 2: physical brick wall it's been hurtling toward.
Speaker 3: We are hitting that wall very fast.
Speaker 2: So to understand how a hidden superpower like this could
Speaker 2: completely redefine technology, we have to understand the blinders we
Speaker 2: were wearing. We have to go back to that century
Speaker 2: old binary.
Speaker 3: The two boxes, right, the.
Speaker 2: Two rigid boxes we tried to force all magnetic materials into.
Speaker 2: So let's start with the one everyone actually knows, ferromagnetism.
Speaker 3: Ferromagnetism, right, So, this is the classic refrigerator magnet. It's
Speaker 3: the compass needle pointing north.
Speaker 2: The one we all played with us kids, exactly.
Speaker 3: But to truly grasp what makes it unique and ultimately
Speaker 3: what makes it a huge problem for modern computing, we
Speaker 3: have to zoom all the way down down to the
Speaker 3: quantum level.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's go.
Speaker 3: We need to look at the electrons inside the atoms
Speaker 3: of that magnet. Because electrons possess an intrinsic quantum property
Speaker 3: that we call spin.
Speaker 2: And just to clarify this, for anyone visualizing like tiny
Speaker 2: planets orbiting a sun, they aren't literally spinning on an
Speaker 2: axis like a toy top, right.
Speaker 3: That is a crucial distinction. Yes, in the quantum realm
Speaker 3: things they don't behave like macroscopic objects. So when we
Speaker 3: say an electron has spin, what we actually mean is
Speaker 3: it possesses intrinsic angular momentum and an associated magnetic moment.
Speaker 2: That's a lot of physics jargon.
Speaker 3: It is. Yeah, So the most helpful way to visualize
Speaker 3: it without getting totally bogged down in quantum field theory
Speaker 3: is to just imagine every single electron carrying a microscopic
Speaker 3: compass needle, a tiny compass needle, Okay, right, it has
Speaker 3: a direction and because of that, it generates a tiny
Speaker 3: localized magnetic field.
Speaker 2: So it's every single electron has this tiny compass needle.
Speaker 2: What happens inside a ferromagnet to actually make it stick
Speaker 2: to my refrigerator, Well.
Speaker 3: It comes down to quantum mechanical interactions between the neighboring atoms,
Speaker 3: specifically something called the exchange interaction.
Speaker 2: The exchange interaction.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and a ferromagnet, the energetic landscape basically dictates that
Speaker 3: it is highly highly favorable for all of those neighboring
Speaker 3: microscopic compass needles to point in the exact same direction.
Speaker 3: They all line up, they allligne exactly. If one points up,
Speaker 3: the one next to it desperately wants to point up
Speaker 3: as well.
Speaker 2: It's like a massive cooperative effect.
Speaker 3: Tremendously operative. I mean, you have trillions upon trillions of electrons,
Speaker 3: and because their individual magnetic moments are all parallel, those
Speaker 3: tiny microscopic forces add up. They compound, right, They compound
Speaker 3: upon one another, and that creates a strong macroscopic net
Speaker 3: magnetic field that actually projects out into the physical space
Speaker 3: around the material.
Speaker 2: Ah. And that's the invisible force reaching out across the
Speaker 2: air gap and grabbing the steel door of your fridge.
Speaker 3: That's exactly it.
Speaker 2: Which I mean makes them incredibly useful for the technology
Speaker 2: we've relied on for decades because we can easily read
Speaker 2: that strong external.
Speaker 3: Field right, very easily.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can manipulate it, like if you want to
Speaker 2: store a piece of data a one or a zero,
Speaker 2: you just apply an external magnetic field to a tiny
Speaker 2: piece of ferromagnet and you just force all its compass
Speaker 2: needles to point up for a one or down for
Speaker 2: a zero.
Speaker 3: That is the entire basis of traditional magnetic hard drives.
Speaker 3: You nailed it.
Speaker 2: It's a brilliant system for data storage at a macro level.
Speaker 3: It is because ferromagnets essentially, well, they shout their state
Speaker 3: to the world. They're loud, very loud. Yeah, But that
Speaker 3: exact property, the shouting, that really strong external field, that
Speaker 3: becomes a fatal flaw when you try to push technology
Speaker 3: into the.
Speaker 2: Future because of the crosstalk problem.
Speaker 3: Exactly.
Speaker 2: I really want to build a visual for this because
Speaker 2: I think it's the core tension driving the need for
Speaker 2: completely new material.
Speaker 3: Okay, let's visualize it.
Speaker 2: Imagine you have a giant crowd of people at an
Speaker 2: outdoor concert at night, and every single person is holding
Speaker 2: a wildly powerful flashlight.
Speaker 3: Good analogy, Yeah.
Speaker 2: A ferromagnet. It's basically like a crowd where everyone points
Speaker 2: their flashlight directly at the stage. It creates this massive, blinding,
Speaker 2: unified beam of light. It's undeniable.
Speaker 3: It's a highly readable signal. You absolutely cannot miss it.
Speaker 2: Right, But if you are standing anywhere near that crowd,
Speaker 2: you are getting blinded. The light just bleeds everywhere.
Speaker 3: It floods the whole area.
Speaker 2: And that is the problem with shrinking computer chips. Right,
Speaker 2: if I want to make my processor faster and more capable,
Speaker 2: I need to pack billions of memory cells closer and
Speaker 2: closer together on a tiny piece of silicon.
Speaker 3: Right, you need density.
Speaker 2: But if those memory cells are ferromagnets, if they are
Speaker 2: a crowd of people shining blinding flashlights, they start interfering
Speaker 2: with their neighbors.
Speaker 3: The magnetic fields bleed into one another. It's a nightmare.
Speaker 3: If you pack two microscopic ferromagnets too closely together, the
Speaker 3: stray magnetic field from say sell A might accidentally reach
Speaker 3: over and flip the compass needles and sell b Oh.
Speaker 2: Wow, so you've just corrupted your data.
Speaker 3: You've completely lost your data. So as engineers try to
Speaker 3: shrink electronics down to the single nanometer scale, FERA magnets
Speaker 3: fundamentally refuse to cooperate.
Speaker 2: They demand personal space.
Speaker 3: They do their external fields are simply too loud.
Speaker 2: Which naturally forces physicists to look at the second box.
Speaker 2: If feramagnets are too loud, we clearly need something quiet.
Speaker 2: Enter anti ferromagnetism.
Speaker 3: Anti ferromagnetism. Yes, these represent the absolute inverse of that
Speaker 3: cooperative behavior we just talked about.
Speaker 2: Oh, they don't lie.
Speaker 3: No. In these materials, the atomic lattice is structured so
Speaker 3: that the exchange interaction does the exact opposite. It forces
Speaker 3: neighboring electrons to point their compass needles in perfectly opposing directions.
Speaker 2: So it's like an alternating pattern at the atomic level,
Speaker 2: up down, up.
Speaker 3: Down, constantly alternating. And the mathematical result of that perfect
Speaker 3: alternation is that for every single electron generating a microscopic
Speaker 3: magnetic field pointings.
Speaker 2: There's an adjacent electron generating an equal and opposite field
Speaker 2: pointing down right.
Speaker 3: They cancel each other out completely perfectly to zero. The
Speaker 3: macroscopic net magnetic field of an anti ferromagnet is totally
Speaker 3: non existent. Wow. If you hold a piece of anti
Speaker 3: ferromagnetic material, like say pure chromium, up to your refrigerator,
Speaker 3: it will just fall straight to the floor.
Speaker 2: It doesn't even feel magnetic.
Speaker 3: To the outside world. It doesn't look magnetic at all.
Speaker 3: It projects absolutely zero stray fields into the surrounding.
Speaker 2: Environment, which sounds like the absolute perfect solution to the
Speaker 2: crosstalk problem. I mean, if they don't project a field,
Speaker 2: you could pack a billion of them side by side
Speaker 2: on a microscopic chip and they wouldn't interfere with each
Speaker 2: other at all.
Speaker 3: Right, they are entirely quiet.
Speaker 2: They're beautifully quiet.
Speaker 3: They are beautifully quiet. You can achieve incredible packing density.
Speaker 3: But their silence creates an entirely new agonizing engineering nightmare,
Speaker 3: which is, how do you talk to them? How do
Speaker 3: you read the data?
Speaker 2: Oh, because they keep all their magnetic secrets locked up inside.
Speaker 3: Exactly the external field is zero, which means you cannot
Speaker 3: easily read their internal state, and furthermore, you cannot easily
Speaker 3: write data to them. They're stubborn, incredibly stubborn. If you
Speaker 3: wave a standard magnet over an anti ferromagnet, the alternating
Speaker 3: up and down spins are so tightly coupled in their
Speaker 3: opposing arrangement that they largely just ignore the external influence.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's bring back the concert crowd analogy to visualize
Speaker 2: this one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's do that.
Speaker 2: So an antifararomagnet is like a massive crowd where everyone
Speaker 2: pairs off. You face the person directly next to you,
Speaker 2: and you point your powerful flashlights squarely at each other's chests.
Speaker 3: I love this.
Speaker 2: Yes, from the outside, like looking down from a helicopter,
Speaker 2: the crowd is pitch black. No light escapes the perimeter
Speaker 2: because every single beam is perfectly absorbed and canceled out
Speaker 2: by the person standing opposite.
Speaker 3: The internal energy is intense, but the external projection is zero, so.
Speaker 2: It's completely non interfering, which is great for the neighbors,
Speaker 2: but it's totally useless if you actually want to illuminate
Speaker 2: something else, or you know, in the case of a computer,
Speaker 2: if you want to read a data state to see
Speaker 2: if it's a one or a zero.
Speaker 3: That dynamic right there is the defining Goldilocks problem that
Speaker 3: plagued solid state physics and material science for decades.
Speaker 2: The Goldilocks problem.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the industry was desperate for a material that was
Speaker 3: just right. We needed the strong, easily readable internal polarization
Speaker 3: of the flashlight crowd pointing at the stage.
Speaker 2: Combined with the perfectly quiet, non interfering extraer profile of
Speaker 2: the crowd pointing their flashlights at each other.
Speaker 3: Exactly. We needed a material that was somehow both loud and.
Speaker 2: Quiet, a material that had a strong magnetic signal but
Speaker 2: zero net magnetic field, which based on the laws of
Speaker 2: physics as they were taught in literally every university on
Speaker 2: Earth was basically asking for a contradiction.
Speaker 3: It was a paradox.
Speaker 2: It was like asking a chemist to invent a dry liquid.
Speaker 3: Right if the rules of symmetry simply forbade it. I mean,
Speaker 3: when the physicists study crystals, they rely heavily on symmetry,
Speaker 3: specifically time reversal symmetry and crystal lattice symmetry, and the
Speaker 3: established dogma dictated a hard mathematical rule. If the spins
Speaker 3: of the electrons cancel each other out in physical space,
Speaker 3: leaving a net magnetization of zero, you absolutely cannot have
Speaker 3: macroscopic ferromagnet like spin effects.
Speaker 2: The two traits were just mutually.
Speaker 3: Exclusive, completely mutually exclusive.
Speaker 2: Until the early twenty twenty until the twenty twenties. Yes,
Speaker 2: and this is where the story shifts from establish history
Speaker 2: to a real time signentific revolution. And what really fascinates
Speaker 2: me is that this paradigm shift wasn't discovered by someone
Speaker 2: accidentally spilling chemicals in a lab. Yeah, dropping a piece
Speaker 2: of metal and going eureka. This was cracked mathematically by
Speaker 2: theorists looking at the fundamental equations of the universe and
Speaker 2: realizing that the rigid rule book actually had.
Speaker 3: A loophole, a magnificent, glaring.
Speaker 2: Loophole, Tell me about it.
Speaker 3: So, around twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two, theoretical physicists,
Speaker 3: most notably pioneers like Viborimay called gyros Nova and Tamarsh Ungworth,
Speaker 3: they began intensely interrogating those fundamental symmetries.
Speaker 2: They went back to the math.
Speaker 3: They went deep into the math. They were looking at
Speaker 3: the incredibly complex geometric arrangements of atoms in certain crystals,
Speaker 3: and their mathematical models revealed something startling.
Speaker 2: What did they find?
Speaker 3: They found that there are specific, highly complex crystal symmetries
Speaker 3: that allow a material to masquerade as a perfectly boring
Speaker 3: anti ferromagnet in physical space while actually possessing a hidden
Speaker 3: superpower in an entirely different domain.
Speaker 2: Okay, hold on, we are about to cross the threshold here,
Speaker 2: and I want to make sure no one gets left behind.
Speaker 2: Sure you just mentioned an entirely different domain.
Speaker 3: I did.
Speaker 2: We're talking about a concept called momentum space or k
Speaker 2: space K space, and to understand the altar twist in
Speaker 2: alter magnets, we have to understand the space because it
Speaker 2: is not the physical three D space of up, down, left,
Speaker 2: right that we live in.
Speaker 3: No, it requires a complete shift in perspective.
Speaker 2: Okay, shift me.
Speaker 3: When solid state physicists want to truly understand how electrons
Speaker 3: behave inside a crystal lattice, looking at their physical position,
Speaker 3: their x, y, and z coordinates, it often isn't very helpful.
Speaker 3: Why not, Thanks to quantum mechanics, electrons behaving inside a
Speaker 3: crystal actually act as.
Speaker 2: Waves, oh right, wave particle duality exactly, So their.
Speaker 3: Behavior is defined by their energy and their motion, not
Speaker 3: just where they're sitting.
Speaker 2: So instead of mapping where the electron is, we map
Speaker 2: where it is going and how much energy.
Speaker 3: Has precisely we plot this in a mathematical realm called
Speaker 3: momentum space.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: In this conceptual map, the coordinates are no longer physical locations.
Speaker 3: They are the directions and the momentum vectors of the
Speaker 3: moving electrons. It essentially maps the flow of the waves.
Speaker 2: Let me try to build a bridge to this, because
Speaker 2: it's a bit abstract.
Speaker 3: It's very abstract. Take your time.
Speaker 2: Normally, if I'm driving my car and I choose to
Speaker 2: turn the left to go to the grocery store, or
Speaker 2: I turn right to go to the park. I'm just
Speaker 2: changing direction in physical space.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: The road itself doesn't fundamentally change its physical properties based
Speaker 2: on which way my car is facing. I'm the exact
Speaker 2: same car, experiencing the exact same rules of physics, just
Speaker 2: heading towards a different destination.
Speaker 3: That's how normal physics works.
Speaker 2: Yes, but if I understand the theory behind alter magnets correctly,
Speaker 2: you are saying that in these specific crystals, the electrons
Speaker 2: spin fundamentally alters the traffic rules it experiences, depending entirely
Speaker 2: on which direction it is driving.
Speaker 3: The traffic analogy is excellent for this. Let's look at
Speaker 3: a normal material first, even a standard anti ferromagnet. Okay,
Speaker 3: According to a fundamental principle of physics known as Kramer's degeneracy.
Speaker 4: Cramer's degeneracy right, it states that an electron with an
Speaker 4: upspin an electron with a downspin should be able to
Speaker 4: travel in the exact same direction, with the exact same
Speaker 4: momentum and experience the exact same energy landscape.
Speaker 2: They can share the same lane on the highway without
Speaker 2: bumping into each other or experiencing different speed limits.
Speaker 3: The universe treats them equally regardless of their spin, as
Speaker 3: long as there is no external magnetic field applied. Okay,
Speaker 3: that makes sense, but the theorists made it call Sonva Youngworth.
Speaker 3: They proved mathematically that ultramagnets violently break that degeneracy, They
Speaker 3: lift it entirely.
Speaker 2: But how if the material has zero net magnetic field.
Speaker 2: Like we said earlier, what on Earth is changing the
Speaker 2: rules for the electrons?
Speaker 3: It is the geometric arrangent of the atoms themselves, the
Speaker 3: geometry geometry in an alternate the crystal lattice has a
Speaker 3: very specific alternating anisotropic.
Speaker 2: Structure, anisotropic meaning it's not the same in all directions exactly.
Speaker 3: So this means that if you are an electron with
Speaker 3: an upspin moving say north, through the momentum space of
Speaker 3: the crystal, the electric fields of the surrounding atoms create
Speaker 3: a very favorable low energy path for you.
Speaker 2: So for the upspin electron going north, the road is
Speaker 2: a beautifully paved multi lane highway, smooth sailing.
Speaker 3: But if you are an electron with a downspin and
Speaker 3: you try to travel that exact same northern.
Speaker 2: Route down the same highway right.
Speaker 3: The atomic geometry interacts with your spin differently for you,
Speaker 3: the crystal suddenly behaves as if it is a high energy,
Speaker 3: high resistance path.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, so the highway turns into a muddy, pothole
Speaker 2: filled dirt road solely because of the direction of my
Speaker 2: little quantum compass needle.
Speaker 3: Exactly. The material literally separates and filters the electrons based
Speaker 3: on the relationship between their spin and their momentum. That
Speaker 3: is why this phenomenon is called spin splitting. And the
Speaker 3: truly beautiful part of the reason we actually use the
Speaker 3: prefix altar and ultramagnet is the alternating nature.
Speaker 2: Of these traffic rules because it flips.
Speaker 3: Yes, if you reverse the direction of travel, the roles
Speaker 3: perfectly reverse.
Speaker 2: So if I drive east instead of north, suddenly the
Speaker 2: down spin electrons get the smooth, paved highway and the
Speaker 2: upspin electrons are forced onto the dirt road.
Speaker 3: Yes, the spin preference alternates depending on the trajectory through
Speaker 3: the brilliant zone. Brilliant zone, which is essentially the fundamental
Speaker 3: map of this momentum space we've been talking about. Got
Speaker 3: it and this alternating pattern, It isn't random, It forms
Speaker 3: incredibly elegant geometric shapes in momentum.
Speaker 2: Space, like what kind of shapes?
Speaker 3: Well, depending on the specific crystal, these spin split bands
Speaker 3: form shapes that look like four leaf clovers, which we
Speaker 3: call D wave symmetry, or even more complex six or
Speaker 3: eight lobe shapes known as G wave or higher even parity.
Speaker 2: Symmetries, like something out of a science fiction novel.
Speaker 3: Honestly beautiful math.
Speaker 2: The material is passively patterning the behavior of electrons, creating
Speaker 2: this alternating, multilobed filter of spin polarization.
Speaker 3: But wait, I have a question about the actual mechanics of.
Speaker 2: This, because for decades, whenever a physicists talked about coupling
Speaker 2: an electron spin to its momentum, tying the compass needle
Speaker 2: to the direction of travel, they relied on something called
Speaker 2: spin orbit coupling.
Speaker 3: Spin orbit coupling a very well established phenomenon.
Speaker 2: Yes, and from what I understand, spin orbit coupling generally
Speaker 2: requires very heavy elements, right, You need materials like platinum
Speaker 2: or bismuth or tungsten.
Speaker 3: Yes, elements with massive nuclei.
Speaker 2: Because the nucleus is so huge and highly charged. When
Speaker 2: an electron whips around it at a significant fraction of
Speaker 2: the speed of light, relativistic effects kick in exactly, the
Speaker 2: electron essentially experiences the electric field of the nucleus as
Speaker 2: a magnetic field, which then interacts with its spin. It
Speaker 2: requires heavy microsky machinery to force the spin to care
Speaker 2: about the orbit.
Speaker 3: That was the accepted paradigm. If you want it strong
Speaker 3: spin momentum locking, you absolutely needed heavy elements to generate
Speaker 3: relativistic spin orbit.
Speaker 2: Coupling, which is a pain right.
Speaker 3: It is a massive headache for manufacturing because heavy elements
Speaker 3: are often rare, they're expensive, and they're incredibly difficult to
Speaker 3: integrate into standard silicon manufacturing processes.
Speaker 2: But ultramagnets bypass this entirely.
Speaker 3: That is the absolute shocker of this theoretical breakthrough. Wow,
Speaker 3: the theorists prove that the massive spin splitting and ultramagnets,
Speaker 3: these extreme alternating traffic rules, happens entirely without relativistic spin
Speaker 3: orbit coupling.
Speaker 2: It doesn't need the heavy elements at all.
Speaker 3: It doesn't need them. It is driven purely by the
Speaker 3: static electric fields and the geometric crystal symmetry of light
Speaker 3: common elements.
Speaker 2: The geometry itself is doing all the heavy lifting. Yes,
Speaker 2: it's achieving the impossible without needing the complex machinery. It
Speaker 2: isn't acting like a ferromagnet when you look at electron trains,
Speaker 2: giving you these strong polarized spin currents depending on the
Speaker 2: direction you push the electrons. But to the outside world,
Speaker 2: looking at the physical space, it is as quiet and
Speaker 2: non magnetic as an anti ferromagnet.
Speaker 3: It is the flawless solution to the Goldilocks problem. The
Speaker 3: crystal itself acts like a highly sophisticated series of quantum.
Speaker 2: Prisms, A quantum prism.
Speaker 3: I like that from the outside, the crowd is pitch black,
Speaker 3: But if you try to walk through the crowd, the
Speaker 3: specific angle you walk dictates whether you get hit with
Speaker 3: a blinding beam of uppolarized light or down polarized light.
Speaker 2: That math is just stunning. The theory is so elegant,
Speaker 2: But we both know that theoretical physics is absolutely littered
Speaker 2: with beautiful math that turns out to be entirely fictitious
Speaker 2: in the real world.
Speaker 3: Oh, absolutely, string theory anyone.
Speaker 2: Right, A pristine chalkboard equation doesn't build a faster smartphone.
Speaker 2: So how did the scientific community actually move this from
Speaker 2: a theoretical curiosity into undeniable physical reality Because this didn't
Speaker 2: remain just a theory for very long now.
Speaker 3: The turnaround was breathtakingly fast, and I think it's a
Speaker 3: testament to how aggressively the material science community mobilized around this.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Timeline wise, the theoretical framework solidified around twenty twenty
Speaker 2: one and twenty twenty two, and.
Speaker 3: By early twenty twenty four, experimentalists had published undeniable direct
Speaker 3: proof that alter magnetism exists in real physical crystals.
Speaker 2: That's basically overnight in physics terms.
Speaker 3: It really is, and the tool they used to prove
Speaker 3: it is a technique with a very intimidating name. It's
Speaker 3: called angle resolved photo emission spectroscopy or a piece.
Speaker 2: Okay, wait, you just dropped a massive acronym on me,
Speaker 2: angle resolved.
Speaker 3: What are piece?
Speaker 2: If these materials look completely magnetically dead from the outside,
Speaker 2: how does shining light on them tell us what their
Speaker 2: internal quantum traffic rules are doing? Like break down how
Speaker 2: Arpie's actually provides the proof here.
Speaker 3: Sure, think of an airpiece machine as the ultimate pair
Speaker 3: of quantum glasses. As you said, you can't just stick
Speaker 3: a convey mentional magnetic probe onto the surface of an ultramagnet.
Speaker 3: It will register zero net magnetization.
Speaker 2: Because of the canceled out spins.
Speaker 3: Right, so you have to interrogate the electrons themselves directly.
Speaker 3: So researchers take the crystal and place it in an
Speaker 3: ultra high vacuum chamber. Then they use a synchrotron, which
Speaker 3: is a massive particle accelerator, to generate a beam of
Speaker 3: incredibly intense, precisely tuned ultraviolet or X ray light.
Speaker 2: Wait, we are hitting a tiny crystal with the output
Speaker 2: of a particle accelerator.
Speaker 3: We are blasting it with high energy photons.
Speaker 2: Yes, that is intense.
Speaker 3: And when those photons hit the surface of the crystal,
Speaker 3: they interact to the electrons inside. If a photon has
Speaker 3: enough energy, it transfers that energy to an electron, actually
Speaker 3: breaking its bond to the atom and ejecting it completely
Speaker 3: out of the material into the vacuum.
Speaker 2: Okay, that sounds really familiar. That is the photoelectric effect, right,
Speaker 2: It is the exact phenomenon Albert Einstein won his Nobel
Speaker 2: Prize for explaining.
Speaker 3: The very same. But an Rp's machine, it doesn't just
Speaker 3: indiscriminately count the electrons flying off the surface. It is
Speaker 3: far far more sophisticated. Oh so it features a highly
Speaker 3: sensitive detector that measures two critical pieces of information. For
Speaker 3: every single ejected electron, it measures its exact kinetic energy,
Speaker 3: so how fast it's moving and the precise angle at
Speaker 3: which it was ejected.
Speaker 2: Ah, I see where this is going. By measuring its
Speaker 2: speed and trajectory as it leaves the crystal, you can
Speaker 2: use the laws of conservation of energy and momentum to
Speaker 2: reverse engineer exactly what that electron was doing before the
Speaker 2: light hit it.
Speaker 3: You are capturing a direct snapshot of the electron's life
Speaker 3: inside the material. You are literally mapping momentum space in
Speaker 3: real time.
Speaker 2: That is brilliant.
Speaker 3: By painstakingly measuring millions of these ejected electrons at different angles,
Speaker 3: experimentalists built a visual map of the energy bands inside
Speaker 3: the crystal.
Speaker 2: They were looking for the traffic rules. They were looking
Speaker 2: for the dirt road and the highway we talked.
Speaker 3: About exactly, and when they pointed these massive arpiece machines
Speaker 3: at a specific crystal called Mangani telluride abbreviated as Mkinese telluride,
Speaker 3: they saw it perfectly.
Speaker 2: They found it.
Speaker 3: The data revealed the lifted Kramer's degeneracy. They visually confirmed
Speaker 3: the spin.
Speaker 2: Split bands unbelievable.
Speaker 3: They could mathematically prove that electrons moving in one direction
Speaker 3: through the manganese telluride had a vastly different energy profile
Speaker 3: than electrons moving in another.
Speaker 2: Direction, forming that exact alternating, multi lobed clover leaf pattern
Speaker 2: the theorists predicted.
Speaker 3: It was a flawless vindication of the math.
Speaker 2: Flawless, And this, I think leads to what is the
Speaker 2: most dramatic irony in this entire scientific saga.
Speaker 3: I know exactly what you're going to say.
Speaker 2: You mentioned manganese telluride, and other early confirmed candidates included
Speaker 2: ruthenrem dioxide and chromium antimenide. These aren't exotic, newly synthesized
Speaker 2: compounds created in a multimillion dollar collider somewhere.
Speaker 3: No, they're not.
Speaker 2: These materials have been known for decades, it decades. How
Speaker 2: is it possible that some of the most brilliant physicists
Speaker 2: on on Earth had these exact materials sitting in their
Speaker 2: labs for fifty years and totally missed this massive phenomenon.
Speaker 3: It is a sobering reminder of how assumptions dictate discovery.
Speaker 2: It really is, because they just assumed they were normal, exactly.
Speaker 3: These materials were extensively studied in the twentieth century. We
Speaker 3: mapped their crystal structures, we measured their electrical conductivity, and
Speaker 3: because they exhibited zero external magnetic field, they were universally
Speaker 3: classified as standard conventional anti feral magnets.
Speaker 2: They were thrown into the second box.
Speaker 3: You were thrown right into the second box. Physicists operated
Speaker 3: under the premise that if the net magnetization is zero,
Speaker 3: the internal spin dynamics across all momentum directions must perfectly
Speaker 3: cancel out.
Speaker 2: We assumed that because the outside was quiet, the inside
Speaker 2: must be perfectly symmetric and mooring.
Speaker 3: Right. They simply didn't possess the theoretical framework, the loophole
Speaker 3: discovered by a mache Call and Sonova to even formulate
Speaker 3: the question.
Speaker 2: You can't look for something you don't know exists exactly.
Speaker 3: They didn't know to ask whether momentum dependent spin splitting
Speaker 3: could exist without heavy elements and spin orbit coupling. In science,
Speaker 3: if your theoretical framework tells you a phenomenon is mathematically impossible,
Speaker 3: you don't said grant money building a highly complex RPS
Speaker 3: experiment to look for it.
Speaker 2: No one's going to fund that exactly. It's like, I
Speaker 2: have an analogy for this. It's like inheriting an old
Speaker 2: house from your grandparents, living in it for fifty years,
Speaker 2: and one day you casually lean against a bookshelf in
Speaker 2: the living room and it swings open to reveal a massive,
Speaker 2: high tech underground laboratory. I love that the lab was
Speaker 2: there the entire time you were eating cereal in the kitchen.
Speaker 2: You know, you just didn't know the hidden mechanism existed
Speaker 2: to open the door.
Speaker 3: The twenty twenty one theory was the blueprint to the
Speaker 3: hidden mechanism, and arp HAS experiments were the act of
Speaker 3: pushing the bookshelf.
Speaker 2: Pushing the bookshelf, yes, And.
Speaker 3: The moment that door swung open. I mean, the floodgates
Speaker 3: of discovery just burst. It wasn't just an isolated quirk
Speaker 3: in manganese.
Speaker 2: Tell you're right, it wasn't a one off at all.
Speaker 3: Once the material science community knew the geometric signatures to
Speaker 3: look for, twenty twenty four and twenty twenty five saw
Speaker 3: an absolute explosion of conformations.
Speaker 2: They realized the hidden laboratory was connected to a global
Speaker 2: tunnel network. Basically, they found ultramagnetic properties everywhere everywhere.
Speaker 3: They found them in organic crystals which are heavily based
Speaker 3: on carbon. Wow, they found them in pallic borides. They
Speaker 3: discovered altramagnetism in complex layered two dimensional materials. They even
Speaker 3: identified what are known as p wave variants in compounds
Speaker 3: like nickel iodide, which exhibit even stranger and more complex
Speaker 3: forms of symmetry breaking.
Speaker 2: The kingdom of altramagnetism was vastly larger than anyone anticipated.
Speaker 3: Much larger. It's everywhere.
Speaker 2: But you know, discovering a cool physics trick in a
Speaker 2: rock doesn't instantly change the world.
Speaker 3: True.
Speaker 2: To actually be useful for building computers, the material has
Speaker 2: to be malleable, it has to be engineerable. And importantly,
Speaker 2: the researchers proved they could synth this size these altramagnets
Speaker 2: into incredibly thin films.
Speaker 3: Right, Yes, that was a huge step.
Speaker 2: We're talking about taking chromium antimonide and growing it in
Speaker 2: layers down to ten nanometers.
Speaker 3: Thick ten nanometers.
Speaker 2: Why is that specific microscopic thickness such a crucial milestone?
Speaker 2: Why does ten nanometers matter?
Speaker 3: Because ten nanometers is the battleground of modern semiconductor manufacturing. Okay,
Speaker 3: if you discover a material with miraculous quantum properties, but
Speaker 3: those properties only exist when the material is a pristine,
Speaker 3: bulky crystal the size of a paper weight. Well, it's
Speaker 3: practically useless for commercial technology.
Speaker 2: You can't put a paper weight in an iPhone exactly.
Speaker 3: You cannot integrate a paper weight into the densely packed
Speaker 3: architecture of a microprocessor. So by proving that the altramagnetic
Speaker 3: spin splitting remains robust and highly functional when sliced down
Speaker 3: to near atomic thinness, experimentalists prove that these materials are
Speaker 3: fully compatible with nanoscale device integration.
Speaker 2: They proved it can actually be built in to its ship. Yes,
Speaker 2: and equally important, this isn't restricted to liquid helium temperatures, right,
Speaker 2: because a lot of quantum breakthroughs sound amazing until you
Speaker 2: read the fine print and realize it only works at
Speaker 2: negative four hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 3: Which is the graveyard of so many promising materials.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, but ultramagnets survive.
Speaker 3: They do. Several of these metallic ultmagots, including varieties of
Speaker 3: ruthenium dioxide, have been proven to operate reliably at realm
Speaker 3: temperature and ambient conditions. That is massive, they're stable, they
Speaker 3: are microscopic. They are essentially ready for engineering.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the ultimate application.
Speaker 3: Here.
Speaker 2: We have the material, we can see its traffic rules,
Speaker 2: we can synthesize it thinly at room temperature. What exactly
Speaker 2: is the technology we are going to build to replace
Speaker 2: the silicon architectures that are currently hitting their physical limits.
Speaker 2: The overatching term for this technological leap is spintronics.
Speaker 3: Correct, Yes, spintronics is the revolution that aultermagnets were seemingly
Speaker 3: tailored for.
Speaker 2: So explain spintronic.
Speaker 3: To fully appreciate why spintronics is necessary, we really have
Speaker 3: to look critically at how the electronic device you're using
Speaker 3: right now functions. Every piece of standard electronics from a
Speaker 3: child's electronic toy to the most formidable artificial intelligence supercomputers
Speaker 3: training large language models, they all rely entirely on manipulating
Speaker 3: the charge.
Speaker 2: Of the electron, moving negative electrical charge from point A
Speaker 2: to point B. It's essentially plumbing, right. We use voltage
Speaker 2: like a pump to push water through pipes.
Speaker 3: A very apt mechanical analogy. Yes, we utilize voltage to
Speaker 3: physically mechanically push electrons through the silicon pathways of a chip,
Speaker 3: and the presence or absence of that electrical charge in
Speaker 3: a capacitor or a transistor represents the ones and zeros
Speaker 3: of our data. Simple enough, but physically shoving matter through
Speaker 3: a solid lattice has a brutal inescapable consequence friction.
Speaker 2: Because the electrons aren't traveling through empty space, They're navigating
Speaker 2: a dense forest of atoms.
Speaker 3: They collide with the atomic lattice, they scatter off impurities,
Speaker 3: and every single collision generates kinetic energy, which manifests heat.
Speaker 2: And heat is the ultimate enemy of modern computing.
Speaker 3: It is the enemy.
Speaker 2: It's why your laptop literally burns your legs if you
Speaker 2: render a video. It's why massive data centers have to
Speaker 2: be constructed in freezing climates or next to rivers, just
Speaker 2: pumping thousands of gallons of water just to stop the
Speaker 2: server racks from literally melting down.
Speaker 3: It's a massive physical problem. We are reaching the bitter
Speaker 3: end of Moore's law because we physically cannot pack silicon
Speaker 3: transistors any closer together or run the voltage any faster
Speaker 3: without the chips just combusting from the heat of the
Speaker 3: moving charge.
Speaker 2: We have hit the thermal wall exactly.
Speaker 3: So the field of spintronics proposes a radical shift in architecture.
Speaker 3: What if instead of burning mass amount of energy to
Speaker 3: physically shove the electron across the chip to transmit information,
Speaker 3: we leave the electron exactly where it is and we
Speaker 3: simply flip its spin.
Speaker 2: Oh, we manipulate the tiny compass needle instead of moving
Speaker 2: the compass itself precisely. Wow.
Speaker 3: If a compass needle pointing up is defined as a
Speaker 3: one and a needle pointing down is a zero, we
Speaker 3: can process and store highly complex information strictly by altering
Speaker 3: the magnetic state of the stationary electrons.
Speaker 2: And because they aren't moving.
Speaker 3: Flipping a quantum spin requires orders of magnitude less energy
Speaker 3: than pushing a physical charge across a barrier, and consequently
Speaker 3: it produces virtually zero waste heat.
Speaker 2: Let's upgrade our analogies here to really capture the difference,
Speaker 2: because this is huge, Go for it. Traditional charge based
Speaker 2: electronics are like moving information by having thousands of people
Speaker 2: physically sprint from one end of a massive football stadium
Speaker 2: to the other. There is chaos. People are bumping into
Speaker 2: each other, everyone is exhausted, and it takes a huge
Speaker 2: amount of energy to coordinate the movement. That's a friction, right,
Speaker 2: But spintronics is like a stadium wave. The people never
Speaker 2: leave their seats, they just stand up and sit down.
Speaker 2: The up and down information travels instantly across the entire stadium,
Speaker 2: but the physical infrastructure barely desserts any energy at all.
Speaker 3: That perfectly illustrates the paradigm shift.
Speaker 2: It really does, so why aren't we doing it?
Speaker 3: The problem, however, is that while spintronics is a brilliant concept,
Speaker 3: executing it has been incredibly difficult. We do actually have
Speaker 3: primitive commercial spintronics right now, most notably m RAM magnetic
Speaker 3: random access.
Speaker 2: Memory, which uses traditional ferromagnets to store the ones and
Speaker 2: zeros right yes.
Speaker 3: And because it uses ferromagnets, MRAM is nonvolatile, it permanently
Speaker 3: remembers the data even when you rip the power cord.
Speaker 2: Out of the well, unlike the volatile RAM and a
Speaker 2: standard computer that gets wiped clean every time it reboots.
Speaker 3: Exactly. But because MRAM relies on ferromagnets, are blinding flashlight
Speaker 3: crowd the cells actively interfere with each other.
Speaker 2: The corosstalk is back.
Speaker 3: The crosstalk prevents engineers from scaling MRAM down to the
Speaker 3: ultra dense microscopic architecture needed to compete with standard silicon memory.
Speaker 3: It is incredibly useful for niche applications, but it's too
Speaker 3: bulky to be the universal memory of the future.
Speaker 2: And as we establish earlier, you can't build memory out
Speaker 2: of traditional antiferro magnets either, because they are too stubborn
Speaker 2: to write to and impossible to read, which leads us
Speaker 2: back to the hero of the story. Altramagnets are the
Speaker 2: ultimate cheat code for the spintronics revolution.
Speaker 3: They really are.
Speaker 2: Let's break down exactly what they allow us to do,
Speaker 2: starting with sheer processing speed.
Speaker 3: The operational speed of an altermagnet is staggering because they
Speaker 3: lack macroscopic magnetic fields. They don't experience the magnetic inertia,
Speaker 3: the sluggishness that limits how fast a ferromagnet can flip
Speaker 3: its state. Because of their unique internal spin dynamics, ultramagnets
Speaker 3: operate natively at terror hertz frequencies.
Speaker 2: We need to contextualize terror hurts for anyone who isn't
Speaker 2: a computer hardware engineer. When you buy a high end
Speaker 2: computer today, the processor speed is measured in gigahertz, say
Speaker 2: four gigahertz. A single gigahertz is one babillion cycles per second.
Speaker 2: A terror hertz is one trillion cycles per second exactly.
Speaker 3: We are looking at a foundational material capable of switching
Speaker 3: states roughly one thousand times faster than the absolute physical
Speaker 3: limits of current silicon or ferromagnetic technology. A thousandfold increase
Speaker 3: a thousandfold increase in base processing capability derived fundamentally from
Speaker 3: swapping the material.
Speaker 2: Architecture, a completely transformative leap and speed. But raw speed
Speaker 2: is useless if you can't read the data efficiently.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: You mentioned earlier that there is a way to electrically
Speaker 2: read the spin state of these materials without using external magnets.
Speaker 2: It's called the anomalous Hall effect, the anomalis Hall effect. Yes,
Speaker 2: explain how that phenomenon solves the read problem.
Speaker 3: Okay, So the standard Hall effect is a very old
Speaker 3: principle used to measure magnetic fields. If you run an
Speaker 3: electrical current through a simple conducting wire and you place
Speaker 3: a strong magnet next to the wire, the magnetic field
Speaker 3: exerts o Lorentz force on the moving electrons, pushing them
Speaker 3: pushing them to one side of the wire. This creates
Speaker 3: a tiny buildup of charge on one edge, which you
Speaker 3: can easily measure with a voltmeter.
Speaker 2: So magnetic field pushes the current sideways.
Speaker 3: Yes, Now, in a standard ferromagnet you encounter the anomalous
Speaker 3: Hall effect.
Speaker 2: Okay, how is that different?
Speaker 3: Because the ferromagnet generates its own massive internal magnetic field.
Speaker 3: That internal field pushes the electrons to the side all
Speaker 3: on its own. You don't need an external magnet. By
Speaker 3: simply measuring the voltage across the edges of the tiny
Speaker 3: memory cell, you immediately know if the internal magnetization is
Speaker 3: pointing up or down. It gives you a clean electrical
Speaker 3: readout of a magnetic state, which.
Speaker 2: Is incredibly convenient for integrating into an electrical computer circuit.
Speaker 2: But again, ferromagnets have the Messi stray fields that ruin
Speaker 2: data density.
Speaker 3: And this is where ultramagnets perform their greatest magic trick.
Speaker 2: I'm ready.
Speaker 3: They exhibit a strong anomalous Hall effect without possessing any
Speaker 3: net external magnetization.
Speaker 2: Wait, how does it push the electron sideways? If the
Speaker 2: macroscopic magnetic field is exis exactly zero.
Speaker 3: It relies entirely on those quantum traffic rules in momentum space.
Speaker 3: The geometry again, the geometry again, the geometric symmetry of
Speaker 3: the crystal lattice itself. The complex spin split bands deflects
Speaker 3: the upspin electrons to one side of the material and
Speaker 3: the down stin electrons to the other, creating a measurable
Speaker 3: electrical voltage.
Speaker 2: So the crystal's internal architecture is passively sorting the electrons,
Speaker 2: giving the computer a perfectly clear, easily readable electrical signal
Speaker 2: that tells you the state of the memory cell. Yes,
Speaker 2: but if you hold a magnetometer next to it, the
Speaker 2: cell is completely silent.
Speaker 3: It perfectly solves the read out dilemma of anti ferromagnets
Speaker 3: while rigorously maintaining their zero crosstalk high density advantage. It
Speaker 3: is the best of both worlds unbelievable, and the control
Speaker 3: mechanisms go even deeper, leading to a concept researchers called
Speaker 3: spin faucets.
Speaker 2: Okay, I have to admit, spin faucets sounds like something
Speaker 2: you'd buy in a hardware store for a quantum plumbing project.
Speaker 3: It does, doesn't it?
Speaker 2: How do you try to spin on and off like
Speaker 2: a fog?
Speaker 3: The visual of the faucet is actually surprisingly accurate here
Speaker 3: because the intense spin splitting in an ultramagnet is entirely
Speaker 3: dependent on the specific direction the electron is traveling. Engineers
Speaker 3: can leverage this to create pure streams of polarized spin.
Speaker 3: If you push an unpolarized electrical current so fifty to
Speaker 3: fifty mix of up and down spins through an ultramagnet
Speaker 3: in a specific crystal direction, the traffic rules aggressively filter
Speaker 3: the electrons. Okay, the downspins get caught in the high
Speaker 3: resistance dirt road and they scatter while the upspins cruise
Speaker 3: down the highway. What emerges out the other side is
Speaker 3: a highly polarized, pure upspin current.
Speaker 2: You filtered the water exactly.
Speaker 3: You filtered it. But the brilliant part is the control.
Speaker 3: If you change the direction of the input current, say
Speaker 3: you turn the faucet handle ninety degrees and push the
Speaker 3: current along a different crystal axis, the traffic rules dictate
Speaker 3: that the polarization vanishes or it switches or perfectly switches
Speaker 3: to a pure down spin current.
Speaker 2: So you have instantaneous, highly efficient electrical control over the
Speaker 2: flow of quantum spin information without ever needing bulky external
Speaker 2: magnetic fields or heavy spin orbit coupling materials to manipulate
Speaker 2: the current.
Speaker 3: When you extrapolate the combination of all these traits, the
Speaker 3: terror herd switching speeds, the dense zero crosstalk memory, effortless
Speaker 3: electrical readout via the anomalous Hall effect, and instant electrical
Speaker 3: control through spin faucets. You really begin to see the
Speaker 3: blueprint for the next century of computing. It's all right there,
Speaker 3: and the timing of this discovery could not be more critical,
Speaker 3: because the current technological landscape is facing an absolute existential
Speaker 3: crisis regarding energy.
Speaker 2: You're talking about the immense bottleneck in artificial intelligence hardware.
Speaker 3: Yes, the sheer scale of modern AI is breaking standard
Speaker 3: silicon architecture.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 3: When you query a large language model, the computer is
Speaker 3: constantly shuttling astronomically large data sets back and forth between
Speaker 3: the processing unit and the memory unit.
Speaker 2: Because there's brit physical things on the board.
Speaker 3: Exactly, and because they use standard charge based electronics. This
Speaker 3: constant physical movement of electrons is brutally slow compared to
Speaker 3: the processing speed, and it consumes catastrophic amounts of electrical power.
Speaker 2: We are reaching a point where tech companies are literally
Speaker 2: investing in dedicated nuclear power plants just to supply enough
Speaker 2: electricity to run their AI server. Farms. It's a global
Speaker 2: energy crisis masquerading as a technological boom.
Speaker 3: The trajectory is completely unsustainable. But if you rip out
Speaker 3: the standard silicon memory and the standard logic gates and
Speaker 3: replace them with ultra dense ultramagnetic spintronics, you fundamentally rewrite
Speaker 3: the energy equation.
Speaker 2: Tell me how.
Speaker 3: First, because ultramagnets are non volatile, you can integrate the
Speaker 3: memory directly on top of the processing logic. You eliminate
Speaker 3: the physical distance that data has to travel.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, the processor and the memory become the exact
Speaker 2: same neighborhood exactly.
Speaker 3: Second, you run that integrated system at tearhurt speeds, forming
Speaker 3: operations one thousand times faster. And Third, because the entire
Speaker 3: architecture relies on flipping localized spins rather than continuously shoving
Speaker 3: electrical charge through a resistive lattice, the total power consumption plummets.
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate engineering trifecta there really is. You
Speaker 2: make the device vastly smaller because there is no crosstalk,
Speaker 2: You make it exponentially faster because it operates at terror
Speaker 2: huts frequencies, And you make it profoundly more energy efficient
Speaker 2: because it generates almost no heat.
Speaker 3: It shatters the agonizing trade offs that have defined hardware
Speaker 3: engineering for fifty years.
Speaker 2: So given all of this, given that we have the
Speaker 2: mathematical proof, we have the ARPS visual proof, and the
Speaker 2: undeniable mechanical advantages, the burning question for anyone listening has
Speaker 2: to be why isn't every new smartphone already powered by ultramagnets.
Speaker 3: That's a billion dollar question.
Speaker 2: If it is the ultimate cheat code, what is causing
Speaker 2: the delay?
Speaker 3: Because the path from a nobel worthy physics discovery to
Speaker 3: a commercial product on a best buy shit shelf is
Speaker 3: notoriously brutal. In material science, we actually call this the
Speaker 3: value of death.
Speaker 2: The value of death.
Speaker 3: It is the agonizing gap between proving a concept in
Speaker 3: a pristine laboratory and reliably mass producing it for the
Speaker 3: global market. We have to confront the harsh engineering realities
Speaker 3: of commercializing an entirely new kingdom of materials.
Speaker 2: Let's walk through the valley of death, then, Because the
Speaker 2: universe never just hands over a trillion dollar technological leap
Speaker 2: without a fight, the very first hurdle has to be synthesis, right,
Speaker 2: growing the crystals.
Speaker 3: Synthesis at scale is an immense challenge. I mean It's
Speaker 3: an incredible achievement for a PhD student to painstakingly grow
Speaker 3: a tiny, structurally perfect microscopic flake of chromium antimonide inside
Speaker 3: a multimillion dollar molecular bean epidaxy chamber, carefully keeping it
Speaker 3: under an ultra high vacuum for an air peace experiment.
Speaker 5: Right, that's lab conditions, But it is a fundamentally different
Speaker 5: universe of engineering to design a commercial fabrication plant capable
Speaker 5: of reliably depositing billions of flawless ultramagtic memory cells onto
Speaker 5: a three hundred millimeter silicon wafer, processing thousands of wafers
Speaker 5: a day with a zero percent failure rate.
Speaker 2: It's the difference between like a master chef spending four
Speaker 2: hours making one Michelin star siufle and a global fast
Speaker 2: food chain trying to engineer a machine that can flawlessly
Speaker 2: replicate that exact sufle a billion times a day. The
Speaker 2: scaling requires totally different methodologies.
Speaker 3: That's a great way to put it, and the margin
Speaker 3: for error is essentially.
Speaker 2: Zero because of the symmetry exactly.
Speaker 3: Remember, the entire phenomenon of ultramagnetism relies on the absolute
Speaker 3: precision of the crystal symmetries. If the manufacturing process introduces
Speaker 3: tiny microscopic defects, missing atom here, a misaligned grain boundary there,
Speaker 3: it disrupts the delicate momentum space traffic rules.
Speaker 2: The spin splitting collapses, The.
Speaker 3: Spin splitting collapses, and your miraculous quantum material turns back
Speaker 3: into a useless, boring piece of rock.
Speaker 2: So manufacturing perfection is hurdle one. Then there is the
Speaker 2: environment hurdle, touched on the fact that some of these
Speaker 2: metallic ultramagnets operate at room temperature. But that isn't universally
Speaker 2: true across the board, is it.
Speaker 3: No, it is not. Ensuring robust room temperature operation across
Speaker 3: a much wider variety of these compounds is a critical
Speaker 3: focus right now.
Speaker 2: Why do we need so many different varieties?
Speaker 3: Well, to build complex modern circuits, engineers can't just use
Speaker 3: one type of metal. They need an entire diverse library
Speaker 3: of ultramagnetic materials. They need some that act as perfect conductors,
Speaker 3: some that act as highly tunable semiconductors, and some that
Speaker 3: act as rigid insulators to block currents.
Speaker 2: You need a full toolbox of materials to build a house,
Speaker 2: not just one type of wood.
Speaker 3: Exactly right now, researchers are aggressively expanding the library of
Speaker 3: room temperature candidates, but that library needs to be significantly larger,
Speaker 3: and the magnetic states need to remain incredibly robust to
Speaker 3: handle the fluctuating thermal environments inside a functioning, heavily utilized
Speaker 3: computer chip.
Speaker 2: And what about the interface problem. We talked about spin
Speaker 2: faucets and using electrical currents to flip the spins, but
Speaker 2: at a commercial scale, getting precise control over billions of
Speaker 2: cells must be staggeringly complex.
Speaker 3: Interface physics is currently one of the hottest areas of research.
Speaker 3: Achieving reliable electrical or optical control over the ultramagnetic order,
Speaker 3: basically forcing it to flip back and forth billions of
Speaker 3: times a second without degrading or failing, requires mastering what
Speaker 3: happens at the boundary line.
Speaker 2: The boundary line, yeah.
Speaker 3: You eventually have to connect these quantum altmagnets to standard
Speaker 3: conventional metals like copper or gold to get the signal
Speaker 3: out to the rest of the computer. The atomic boundary
Speaker 3: between a normal metal and an altramagnet is chaotic, and
Speaker 3: it can disrupt the spin polarization.
Speaker 2: So the scientific community is staring down the valley of
Speaker 2: death but they aren't just sitting around writing grant proposals
Speaker 2: and hoping for a lucky break. Right. How are researchers
Speaker 2: actively attacking these synthesis and interface hurdles.
Speaker 3: They are deploying incredibly sophisticated materials science techniques. The most
Speaker 3: promising avenues currently being explored is strain engineering.
Speaker 2: Strain engineering does that literally mean they are physically stretching
Speaker 2: or squeezing the crystal lattice.
Speaker 3: That is precisely what it means, because the alternating traffic
Speaker 3: rules of an ultramagnet are dictated entirely by the precise
Speaker 3: geometric distance and angle between the atoms. Researchers found that
Speaker 3: if you force the crystal to grow on top of
Speaker 3: a foundational substrate that has a slightly different atomic spacing,
Speaker 3: the ultramagnet is forced to stretch or compress to match
Speaker 3: its foundation.
Speaker 2: You are intentionally warping the crystal.
Speaker 3: You artificially tune the symmetry. By applying just a tiny
Speaker 3: bit of physical strain engineers can artificially enhance the spin splitting,
Speaker 3: force the spin currents to flow more efficiently, or even
Speaker 3: push the thermal stability of the material to operate at
Speaker 3: much higher temperatures.
Speaker 2: You are literally grabbing the quantum highway and bending it
Speaker 2: to force the electrons to behave exactly how you want
Speaker 2: them to. That is phenomenal. What other techniques are they using.
Speaker 3: They're heavily utilize in doping, which is a classic semiconductor technique.
Speaker 6: Like adding impurities right, This involves intentionally introducing minuscule amounts
Speaker 6: of foreign atoms, like say, injecting a few atoms of
Speaker 6: iron into a manganese lattice to subtly alter the electron
Speaker 6: density and artificially stabilize the desired magnetic phases.
Speaker 3: They are also constructing incredibly complex heterostructures.
Speaker 2: Heterostructures meaning stacking different materials like a microscopic sandwich.
Speaker 3: Exactly, they will stack a microscopically thin layer of an
Speaker 3: ultramagnet directly adjacent to a layer of heavy metal or
Speaker 3: even the superconductor.
Speaker 2: To what end.
Speaker 3: By creating these quantum sandwiches, the unique properties of one
Speaker 3: layer can bleed across the atomic boundary into the next
Speaker 3: layer via proximity effects, allowing for much easier electrical control
Speaker 3: of the stubborn ultramagnetic state.
Speaker 2: And we cannot ignore the role that artificial intelligence is
Speaker 2: playing in solving its own hardware crisis. I mean AI
Speaker 2: isn't just the final customer waiting for a faster spentronic chip.
Speaker 2: It is actively being used to design the show.
Speaker 3: Yes, the acceleration provided by AI is arguably the only
Speaker 3: reason this field is moving so incredibly fast. Researchers are
Speaker 3: using high throughput computational screening driven by advanced machine learning
Speaker 3: models to bypass years of trial and error chemistry. Instead
Speaker 3: of spending six months physically synthesizing a random chemical compound
Speaker 3: in a lab to see if it exhibits ultramagnetism, the
Speaker 3: AI can virtually simulate tens of thousands of complex crystal
Speaker 3: structures in a matter of days.
Speaker 2: It calculates the math before the rock ever physically exists.
Speaker 3: It computes the band structures, It maps the momentum space,
Speaker 3: and accurately predicts which hypothetical materials will exhibit the strongest
Speaker 3: ultramagnetic properties before a single researcher ever puts on a
Speaker 3: lab code.
Speaker 2: That's incredible.
Speaker 3: This AI screening is identifying dozens of highly promising new candidates,
Speaker 3: discovering materials that range from perfect insulators to incredibly exotic
Speaker 3: phases like potential topological supercondict.
Speaker 2: It's a profound feedback loop. We are utilizing the current
Speaker 2: generation of AI to discover the quantum materials required to
Speaker 2: physically build the next generation of AI.
Speaker 3: It is and the momentum building in the global scientific
Speaker 3: community is undeniable. If you look at the major roadmaps
Speaker 3: for the semiconductor industry over the next decade, or look
Speaker 3: at the agendas for massive international engineering conferences like the
Speaker 3: IE events in twenty twenty five and twenty twenty six,
Speaker 3: Ultramagnetism is no longer a fringe theoretical topic.
Speaker 2: It's mainstream.
Speaker 3: It is taking center stage. Billions of dollars in research funding,
Speaker 3: both public and private, are violently pivoting towards this field.
Speaker 2: It has undeniably become the central focus of condensed matter physics.
Speaker 2: It is a global race to secure the foundational patents
Speaker 2: of the post silicon era. Absolutely, but taking a step
Speaker 2: back and looking at the commercial realities is the integration step,
Speaker 2: the most difficult part of this entire endeavor. I mean,
Speaker 2: we've spent the last fifty years and literally trillions of
Speaker 2: dollars building a global infrastructure optimized exclusively for manufacturing silicon chin.
Speaker 2: Thus we have it is the most complex supply chain
Speaker 2: in human history. Are we fundamentally trying to drop a
Speaker 2: futuristic warp drive into a nineteen ninety Sedan.
Speaker 3: That is the multi billion dollar tension right there. The
Speaker 3: global semiconductor industry is notoriously fundamentally conservative, and.
Speaker 2: They have to be because it's expensive.
Speaker 3: A single state of the art silicon fabrication plant costs
Speaker 3: upwards of twenty billion dollars to construct. They simply will
Speaker 3: not throw away that infrastructure to accommodate a new material
Speaker 3: unless it can be adapted to their existing machines.
Speaker 2: So that's the workaround.
Speaker 3: The sheer brilliance of the current approach to altarmagnets is
Speaker 3: that researchers are hyper focused on thin films and materials
Speaker 3: that can be deposited using sputtering techniques or chemical vapor deposition,
Speaker 3: which are the exact same machines currently sitting in those
Speaker 3: twenty billion dollar fabs.
Speaker 2: Oh, so they aren't trying to replace the sedan. They
Speaker 2: are engineering the warp drive so it's directly onto the
Speaker 2: sedan's existing engine mounts.
Speaker 3: That is the ultimate goal. They want to seamlessly integrate
Speaker 3: highly efficient ultramagnetic memory cells directly on top of traditional,
Speaker 3: mature silicon logic architectures. It represents an evolutionary, manageable step
Speaker 3: in commercial manufacturing, but a revolutionary paradigm shattering leap in
Speaker 3: computational performance.
Speaker 2: It is genuinely incredible. We're watching the real time, messy,
Speaker 2: complicated birth of an entirely new era of human technology.
Speaker 2: So let's take a moment to pull all of these
Speaker 2: complex threads together. Let's recap the profound journey we have
Speaker 2: just explored.
Speaker 3: Okay, let's recap. We begin with a foundational century old assumption,
Speaker 3: a rigid binary classification system defining magnetism, the two box.
Speaker 3: You had the ferromagnet, the loud, strong material with a
Speaker 3: massive external field that ruined data density, and you had
Speaker 3: the anti ferromagnet, the quiet, stubborn material with zero external
Speaker 3: field that was incredibly dense but practically impossible to read
Speaker 3: it right too.
Speaker 2: A classification system that stood entirely unbroken and unquestioned for
Speaker 2: generations until we saw a masterful theoretical breakthrough in the
Speaker 2: early twenty twenties.
Speaker 3: A realization by theorists that by abandoning physical space and
Speaker 3: interrogating momentum space by mapping how electrons move and wave,
Speaker 3: rather than just where they are. A massive loophole in
Speaker 3: the universe's symmetry rules appeared.
Speaker 2: Which led directly to the conceptualization of ultramagnets, a third,
Speaker 2: previously unmapped kingdom of materials that successfully hides massive ferromagnet
Speaker 2: like spin polarization inside a perfectly quiet anti ferromagnet like exterior.
Speaker 3: They violently split electron spins into separate lanes based purely
Speaker 3: on their direction of travel, completely bypassing the need for heavy,
Speaker 3: expensive elements or relativistic spin orbit coupling.
Speaker 2: And we explored how experimentalists rapidly validated this wild math
Speaker 2: using rpas blasting crystals with synchrotron light to literally photograph
Speaker 2: the quantu of traffic rules.
Speaker 3: In doing so, they realized that these world changing materials
Speaker 3: have been sitting on mundane laboratory for fifty years, masquerating
Speaker 3: as boring rocks.
Speaker 2: And finally, we explored how these precise materials are the
Speaker 2: missing key to the spentronics revolution. They offer a tangible
Speaker 2: path to integrated computing architectures that switch at terror Hurtz frequencies,
Speaker 2: consume a fraction of the energy, and possess the capability
Speaker 2: to save Moore's law and power the AI driven future.
Speaker 3: The entire saga is a profound testament to the idea
Speaker 3: that physics and our understanding of the universe is never
Speaker 3: truly finished. There are always massive blind spots. They are
Speaker 3: always foundational assumptions that desperately need to be challenged. The
Speaker 3: discovery of alter magnets proves that by simply looking at
Speaker 3: an old settled problem through a slightly shifted mathematical lens,
Speaker 3: we can uncover physical phenomena that completely rewrite the boundaries
Speaker 3: of what human technology can achieve.
Speaker 2: Which leaves us with a deeply lingering, almost uncomfortable, mind
Speaker 2: expanding thought. Oh, think about the sheer magnitude of what
Speaker 2: just happened. A fundamental property of the physical universe, a massive, distinct,
Speaker 2: third category of magnetism, hid right under the noses of
Speaker 2: the most brilliant scientists in history for over a century.
Speaker 2: Did And it didn't hide because it was invisible or
Speaker 2: because it required a particle accelerator the size of the
Speaker 2: galaxy to create. It hid simply because human beings were
Speaker 2: applying the wrong assumptions about geometric symmetry. We were so
Speaker 2: confident we knew all the rules. We didn't bother to
Speaker 2: design an experiment to look for the exceptions.
Speaker 3: I thought we had it all figured out.
Speaker 2: So if a revolution capable of redefining global computing could
Speaker 2: be sitting quietly inside a gray piece of manganese telluride
Speaker 2: for fifty years, what other mundane objects harbor world breaking
Speaker 2: quantum secrets. Could the standard glass in your window, the
Speaker 2: simple copper wire running through your walls, or yes, even
Speaker 2: the perfectly ordinary, unremarkable magnets holding up the grocery lists
Speaker 2: on your refrigerator possess hidden dimensions of quantum physics that
Speaker 2: we simply haven't thought to look for.
Speaker 3: Yet. That's a great question.
Speaker 2: What other deeply held assumptions are currently blinding us to
Speaker 2: the next sen of human progress? Because if there is
Speaker 2: one permanent lesson the discovery of altramagnets has taught us,
Speaker 2: it is that the physical universe is far richer, far stranger,
Speaker 2: and far more full of hidden potential than our textbooks
Speaker 2: have ever led us to believe. The quiet revelation in
Speaker 2: magnetism isn't the end of a chapter. It is just
Speaker 2: the beginning