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The New Form of Magnetism Challenging Modern Physics · The Quark Side - Quantum Physics Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the quart Side. Quantum Physics Podcast, an exploration
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: of the fundamental structure of reality, where quantum laws govern matter, energy,
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: and information. Here, uncertainty is a feature, not a flaw,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: and understanding begins at the smallest scales.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: For exactly one hundred years, some of the brightest minds
• 0:31
  Speaker 2: in the history of well human civilization have been staring
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: at perfectly ordinary pieces of rock, completely blind to a
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: superpower hiding inside them.
• 0:41
  Speaker 3: Completely blind.
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: And I really want you to picture that for a second.
• 0:45
  Speaker 2: Generations of Nobel laureates, theoretical physicists, materials scientists, the people
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: building the modern world, right, they were all constrained by
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: this one set of rules about how magnetism works. It
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: was foundational physics, like the kind of settled science you
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: learn in high school and then you just never really
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: question again.
• 1:04
  Speaker 3: You just accept it because we believe there were two
• 1:07
  Speaker 3: fundamental categories of magnetism, a very neat, very binary system.
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: But it turns out the universe doesn't actually care about
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: our neat little categories. We were basically wearing blinders this
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: whole time.
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  Speaker 3: We really were. It is genuinely I mean, it's one
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  Speaker 3: of the most profound oversights in modern physics. Wow, because
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: we are talking about materials that have literally been sitting
• 1:28
  Speaker 3: on laboratory shells for decades. Scientists weighed them, they measured them,
• 1:33
  Speaker 3: they ran currents through them, and categorize them is entirely mundane.
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: Just totally boring.
• 1:39
  Speaker 3: Rocks, exactly boring rocks. But because they were looking through
• 1:43
  Speaker 3: this very specific century old mathematical lens, they missed the
• 1:48
  Speaker 3: fact that these materials, which we now call alter magnets
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: by the way, represent a massive third class of magnetism.
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: A third class.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, and they don't just break the established rules of symmetry.
• 2:01
  Speaker 3: They actually combined traits that we thought were well completely
• 2:04
  Speaker 3: impossible to put together.
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: Which brings us to the real stakes of this conversation,
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: I think, because we aren't just you know, uncovering a
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: quirky historical footnote here, or like a piece of abstract
• 2:13
  Speaker 2: math that only matters to academics.
• 2:15
  Speaker 3: Oh no, not at all.
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: Right, this massive blind spot we just uncovered, it happens
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: to be the key to unlocking the post Silicon era.
• 2:22
  Speaker 3: That's the real headline here.
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we are looking at the foundational architecture for devices
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  Speaker 2: that are a thousand times faster than the phone or
• 2:31
  Speaker 2: the computer you're using right now.
• 2:32
  Speaker 3: To listen to this a thousand times.
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: Yes, we're looking at a path to incredible energy efficiency,
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: something that could potentially save Moore's Law from basically the
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: physical brick wall it's been hurtling toward.
• 2:45
  Speaker 3: We are hitting that wall very fast.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: So to understand how a hidden superpower like this could
• 2:51
  Speaker 2: completely redefine technology, we have to understand the blinders we
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: were wearing. We have to go back to that century
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: old binary.
• 2:58
  Speaker 3: The two boxes, right, the.
• 3:00
  Speaker 2: Two rigid boxes we tried to force all magnetic materials into.
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: So let's start with the one everyone actually knows, ferromagnetism.
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: Ferromagnetism, right, So, this is the classic refrigerator magnet. It's
• 3:12
  Speaker 3: the compass needle pointing north.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: The one we all played with us kids, exactly.
• 3:16
  Speaker 3: But to truly grasp what makes it unique and ultimately
• 3:20
  Speaker 3: what makes it a huge problem for modern computing, we
• 3:23
  Speaker 3: have to zoom all the way down down to the
• 3:26
  Speaker 3: quantum level.
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: Okay, let's go.
• 3:27
  Speaker 3: We need to look at the electrons inside the atoms
• 3:30
  Speaker 3: of that magnet. Because electrons possess an intrinsic quantum property
• 3:34
  Speaker 3: that we call spin.
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: And just to clarify this, for anyone visualizing like tiny
• 3:39
  Speaker 2: planets orbiting a sun, they aren't literally spinning on an
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: axis like a toy top, right.
• 3:44
  Speaker 3: That is a crucial distinction. Yes, in the quantum realm
• 3:48
  Speaker 3: things they don't behave like macroscopic objects. So when we
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: say an electron has spin, what we actually mean is
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: it possesses intrinsic angular momentum and an associated magnetic moment.
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: That's a lot of physics jargon.
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  Speaker 3: It is. Yeah, So the most helpful way to visualize
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  Speaker 3: it without getting totally bogged down in quantum field theory
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  Speaker 3: is to just imagine every single electron carrying a microscopic
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  Speaker 3: compass needle, a tiny compass needle, Okay, right, it has
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  Speaker 3: a direction and because of that, it generates a tiny
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  Speaker 3: localized magnetic field.
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  Speaker 2: So it's every single electron has this tiny compass needle.
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  Speaker 2: What happens inside a ferromagnet to actually make it stick
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  Speaker 2: to my refrigerator, Well.
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  Speaker 3: It comes down to quantum mechanical interactions between the neighboring atoms,
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  Speaker 3: specifically something called the exchange interaction.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: The exchange interaction.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, and a ferromagnet, the energetic landscape basically dictates that
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  Speaker 3: it is highly highly favorable for all of those neighboring
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  Speaker 3: microscopic compass needles to point in the exact same direction.
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  Speaker 3: They all line up, they allligne exactly. If one points up,
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  Speaker 3: the one next to it desperately wants to point up
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  Speaker 3: as well.
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  Speaker 2: It's like a massive cooperative effect.
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  Speaker 3: Tremendously operative. I mean, you have trillions upon trillions of electrons,
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  Speaker 3: and because their individual magnetic moments are all parallel, those
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  Speaker 3: tiny microscopic forces add up. They compound, right, They compound
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  Speaker 3: upon one another, and that creates a strong macroscopic net
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  Speaker 3: magnetic field that actually projects out into the physical space
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  Speaker 3: around the material.
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: Ah. And that's the invisible force reaching out across the
• 5:22
  Speaker 2: air gap and grabbing the steel door of your fridge.
• 5:25
  Speaker 3: That's exactly it.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: Which I mean makes them incredibly useful for the technology
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  Speaker 2: we've relied on for decades because we can easily read
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  Speaker 2: that strong external.
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  Speaker 3: Field right, very easily.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you can manipulate it, like if you want to
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  Speaker 2: store a piece of data a one or a zero,
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  Speaker 2: you just apply an external magnetic field to a tiny
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  Speaker 2: piece of ferromagnet and you just force all its compass
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  Speaker 2: needles to point up for a one or down for
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  Speaker 2: a zero.
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  Speaker 3: That is the entire basis of traditional magnetic hard drives.
• 5:53
  Speaker 3: You nailed it.
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  Speaker 2: It's a brilliant system for data storage at a macro level.
• 5:57
  Speaker 3: It is because ferromagnets essentially, well, they shout their state
• 6:02
  Speaker 3: to the world. They're loud, very loud. Yeah, But that
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  Speaker 3: exact property, the shouting, that really strong external field, that
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  Speaker 3: becomes a fatal flaw when you try to push technology
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  Speaker 3: into the.
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  Speaker 2: Future because of the crosstalk problem.
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: Exactly.
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: I really want to build a visual for this because
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: I think it's the core tension driving the need for
• 6:20
  Speaker 2: completely new material.
• 6:21
  Speaker 3: Okay, let's visualize it.
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  Speaker 2: Imagine you have a giant crowd of people at an
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  Speaker 2: outdoor concert at night, and every single person is holding
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  Speaker 2: a wildly powerful flashlight.
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  Speaker 3: Good analogy, Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: A ferromagnet. It's basically like a crowd where everyone points
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  Speaker 2: their flashlight directly at the stage. It creates this massive, blinding,
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  Speaker 2: unified beam of light. It's undeniable.
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  Speaker 3: It's a highly readable signal. You absolutely cannot miss it.
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  Speaker 2: Right, But if you are standing anywhere near that crowd,
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  Speaker 2: you are getting blinded. The light just bleeds everywhere.
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  Speaker 3: It floods the whole area.
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: And that is the problem with shrinking computer chips. Right,
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: if I want to make my processor faster and more capable,
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  Speaker 2: I need to pack billions of memory cells closer and
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: closer together on a tiny piece of silicon.
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  Speaker 3: Right, you need density.
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  Speaker 2: But if those memory cells are ferromagnets, if they are
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: a crowd of people shining blinding flashlights, they start interfering
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  Speaker 2: with their neighbors.
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  Speaker 3: The magnetic fields bleed into one another. It's a nightmare.
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  Speaker 3: If you pack two microscopic ferromagnets too closely together, the
• 7:20
  Speaker 3: stray magnetic field from say sell A might accidentally reach
• 7:25
  Speaker 3: over and flip the compass needles and sell b Oh.
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  Speaker 2: Wow, so you've just corrupted your data.
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  Speaker 3: You've completely lost your data. So as engineers try to
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  Speaker 3: shrink electronics down to the single nanometer scale, FERA magnets
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  Speaker 3: fundamentally refuse to cooperate.
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  Speaker 2: They demand personal space.
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  Speaker 3: They do their external fields are simply too loud.
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  Speaker 2: Which naturally forces physicists to look at the second box.
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  Speaker 2: If feramagnets are too loud, we clearly need something quiet.
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  Speaker 2: Enter anti ferromagnetism.
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  Speaker 3: Anti ferromagnetism. Yes, these represent the absolute inverse of that
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  Speaker 3: cooperative behavior we just talked about.
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  Speaker 2: Oh, they don't lie.
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  Speaker 3: No. In these materials, the atomic lattice is structured so
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  Speaker 3: that the exchange interaction does the exact opposite. It forces
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  Speaker 3: neighboring electrons to point their compass needles in perfectly opposing directions.
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  Speaker 2: So it's like an alternating pattern at the atomic level,
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  Speaker 2: up down, up.
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  Speaker 3: Down, constantly alternating. And the mathematical result of that perfect
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  Speaker 3: alternation is that for every single electron generating a microscopic
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  Speaker 3: magnetic field pointings.
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  Speaker 2: There's an adjacent electron generating an equal and opposite field
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  Speaker 2: pointing down right.
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  Speaker 3: They cancel each other out completely perfectly to zero. The
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  Speaker 3: macroscopic net magnetic field of an anti ferromagnet is totally
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  Speaker 3: non existent. Wow. If you hold a piece of anti
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  Speaker 3: ferromagnetic material, like say pure chromium, up to your refrigerator,
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  Speaker 3: it will just fall straight to the floor.
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  Speaker 2: It doesn't even feel magnetic.
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  Speaker 3: To the outside world. It doesn't look magnetic at all.
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  Speaker 3: It projects absolutely zero stray fields into the surrounding.
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  Speaker 2: Environment, which sounds like the absolute perfect solution to the
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  Speaker 2: crosstalk problem. I mean, if they don't project a field,
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  Speaker 2: you could pack a billion of them side by side
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  Speaker 2: on a microscopic chip and they wouldn't interfere with each
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  Speaker 2: other at all.
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  Speaker 3: Right, they are entirely quiet.
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  Speaker 2: They're beautifully quiet.
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  Speaker 3: They are beautifully quiet. You can achieve incredible packing density.
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  Speaker 3: But their silence creates an entirely new agonizing engineering nightmare,
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  Speaker 3: which is, how do you talk to them? How do
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  Speaker 3: you read the data?
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  Speaker 2: Oh, because they keep all their magnetic secrets locked up inside.
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  Speaker 3: Exactly the external field is zero, which means you cannot
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  Speaker 3: easily read their internal state, and furthermore, you cannot easily
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  Speaker 3: write data to them. They're stubborn, incredibly stubborn. If you
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  Speaker 3: wave a standard magnet over an anti ferromagnet, the alternating
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  Speaker 3: up and down spins are so tightly coupled in their
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  Speaker 3: opposing arrangement that they largely just ignore the external influence.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, let's bring back the concert crowd analogy to visualize
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  Speaker 2: this one.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, let's do that.
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  Speaker 2: So an antifararomagnet is like a massive crowd where everyone
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  Speaker 2: pairs off. You face the person directly next to you,
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  Speaker 2: and you point your powerful flashlights squarely at each other's chests.
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  Speaker 3: I love this.
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  Speaker 2: Yes, from the outside, like looking down from a helicopter,
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  Speaker 2: the crowd is pitch black. No light escapes the perimeter
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  Speaker 2: because every single beam is perfectly absorbed and canceled out
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  Speaker 2: by the person standing opposite.
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  Speaker 3: The internal energy is intense, but the external projection is zero, so.
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  Speaker 2: It's completely non interfering, which is great for the neighbors,
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  Speaker 2: but it's totally useless if you actually want to illuminate
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  Speaker 2: something else, or you know, in the case of a computer,
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  Speaker 2: if you want to read a data state to see
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  Speaker 2: if it's a one or a zero.
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  Speaker 3: That dynamic right there is the defining Goldilocks problem that
• 10:39
  Speaker 3: plagued solid state physics and material science for decades.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: The Goldilocks problem.
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the industry was desperate for a material that was
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: just right. We needed the strong, easily readable internal polarization
• 10:53
  Speaker 3: of the flashlight crowd pointing at the stage.
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  Speaker 2: Combined with the perfectly quiet, non interfering extraer profile of
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: the crowd pointing their flashlights at each other.
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  Speaker 3: Exactly. We needed a material that was somehow both loud and.
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: Quiet, a material that had a strong magnetic signal but
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  Speaker 2: zero net magnetic field, which based on the laws of
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: physics as they were taught in literally every university on
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: Earth was basically asking for a contradiction.
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  Speaker 3: It was a paradox.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: It was like asking a chemist to invent a dry liquid.
• 11:24
  Speaker 3: Right if the rules of symmetry simply forbade it. I mean,
• 11:27
  Speaker 3: when the physicists study crystals, they rely heavily on symmetry,
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  Speaker 3: specifically time reversal symmetry and crystal lattice symmetry, and the
• 11:34
  Speaker 3: established dogma dictated a hard mathematical rule. If the spins
• 11:39
  Speaker 3: of the electrons cancel each other out in physical space,
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: leaving a net magnetization of zero, you absolutely cannot have
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: macroscopic ferromagnet like spin effects.
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  Speaker 2: The two traits were just mutually.
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  Speaker 3: Exclusive, completely mutually exclusive.
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: Until the early twenty twenty until the twenty twenties. Yes,
• 11:55
  Speaker 2: and this is where the story shifts from establish history
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: to a real time signentific revolution. And what really fascinates
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: me is that this paradigm shift wasn't discovered by someone
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: accidentally spilling chemicals in a lab. Yeah, dropping a piece
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: of metal and going eureka. This was cracked mathematically by
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: theorists looking at the fundamental equations of the universe and
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: realizing that the rigid rule book actually had.
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  Speaker 3: A loophole, a magnificent, glaring.
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: Loophole, Tell me about it.
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  Speaker 3: So, around twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two, theoretical physicists,
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  Speaker 3: most notably pioneers like Viborimay called gyros Nova and Tamarsh Ungworth,
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: they began intensely interrogating those fundamental symmetries.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: They went back to the math.
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: They went deep into the math. They were looking at
• 12:41
  Speaker 3: the incredibly complex geometric arrangements of atoms in certain crystals,
• 12:46
  Speaker 3: and their mathematical models revealed something startling.
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  Speaker 2: What did they find?
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: They found that there are specific, highly complex crystal symmetries
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  Speaker 3: that allow a material to masquerade as a perfectly boring
• 12:58
  Speaker 3: anti ferromagnet in physical space while actually possessing a hidden
• 13:03
  Speaker 3: superpower in an entirely different domain.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: Okay, hold on, we are about to cross the threshold here,
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: and I want to make sure no one gets left behind.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: Sure you just mentioned an entirely different domain.
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: I did.
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: We're talking about a concept called momentum space or k
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: space K space, and to understand the altar twist in
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: alter magnets, we have to understand the space because it
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: is not the physical three D space of up, down, left,
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: right that we live in.
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: No, it requires a complete shift in perspective.
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: Okay, shift me.
• 13:31
  Speaker 3: When solid state physicists want to truly understand how electrons
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: behave inside a crystal lattice, looking at their physical position,
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: their x, y, and z coordinates, it often isn't very helpful.
• 13:42
  Speaker 3: Why not, Thanks to quantum mechanics, electrons behaving inside a
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: crystal actually act as.
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: Waves, oh right, wave particle duality exactly, So their.
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: Behavior is defined by their energy and their motion, not
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: just where they're sitting.
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: So instead of mapping where the electron is, we map
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: where it is going and how much energy.
• 14:00
  Speaker 3: Has precisely we plot this in a mathematical realm called
• 14:03
  Speaker 3: momentum space.
• 14:05
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: In this conceptual map, the coordinates are no longer physical locations.
• 14:10
  Speaker 3: They are the directions and the momentum vectors of the
• 14:13
  Speaker 3: moving electrons. It essentially maps the flow of the waves.
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: Let me try to build a bridge to this, because
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: it's a bit abstract.
• 14:20
  Speaker 3: It's very abstract. Take your time.
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: Normally, if I'm driving my car and I choose to
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: turn the left to go to the grocery store, or
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: I turn right to go to the park. I'm just
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: changing direction in physical space.
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: The road itself doesn't fundamentally change its physical properties based
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: on which way my car is facing. I'm the exact
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: same car, experiencing the exact same rules of physics, just
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: heading towards a different destination.
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: That's how normal physics works.
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: Yes, but if I understand the theory behind alter magnets correctly,
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: you are saying that in these specific crystals, the electrons
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: spin fundamentally alters the traffic rules it experiences, depending entirely
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: on which direction it is driving.
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: The traffic analogy is excellent for this. Let's look at
• 15:03
  Speaker 3: a normal material first, even a standard anti ferromagnet. Okay,
• 15:07
  Speaker 3: According to a fundamental principle of physics known as Kramer's degeneracy.
• 15:11
  Speaker 4: Cramer's degeneracy right, it states that an electron with an
• 15:14
  Speaker 4: upspin an electron with a downspin should be able to
• 15:17
  Speaker 4: travel in the exact same direction, with the exact same
• 15:21
  Speaker 4: momentum and experience the exact same energy landscape.
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: They can share the same lane on the highway without
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: bumping into each other or experiencing different speed limits.
• 15:30
  Speaker 3: The universe treats them equally regardless of their spin, as
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: long as there is no external magnetic field applied. Okay,
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: that makes sense, but the theorists made it call Sonva Youngworth.
• 15:42
  Speaker 3: They proved mathematically that ultramagnets violently break that degeneracy, They
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: lift it entirely.
• 15:47
  Speaker 2: But how if the material has zero net magnetic field.
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: Like we said earlier, what on Earth is changing the
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: rules for the electrons?
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: It is the geometric arrangent of the atoms themselves, the
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: geometry geometry in an alternate the crystal lattice has a
• 16:01
  Speaker 3: very specific alternating anisotropic.
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: Structure, anisotropic meaning it's not the same in all directions exactly.
• 16:08
  Speaker 3: So this means that if you are an electron with
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: an upspin moving say north, through the momentum space of
• 16:14
  Speaker 3: the crystal, the electric fields of the surrounding atoms create
• 16:19
  Speaker 3: a very favorable low energy path for you.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: So for the upspin electron going north, the road is
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: a beautifully paved multi lane highway, smooth sailing.
• 16:29
  Speaker 3: But if you are an electron with a downspin and
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: you try to travel that exact same northern.
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: Route down the same highway right.
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: The atomic geometry interacts with your spin differently for you,
• 16:40
  Speaker 3: the crystal suddenly behaves as if it is a high energy,
• 16:43
  Speaker 3: high resistance path.
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: Oh wow, so the highway turns into a muddy, pothole
• 16:47
  Speaker 2: filled dirt road solely because of the direction of my
• 16:50
  Speaker 2: little quantum compass needle.
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: Exactly. The material literally separates and filters the electrons based
• 16:56
  Speaker 3: on the relationship between their spin and their momentum. That
• 16:59
  Speaker 3: is why this phenomenon is called spin splitting. And the
• 17:03
  Speaker 3: truly beautiful part of the reason we actually use the
• 17:05
  Speaker 3: prefix altar and ultramagnet is the alternating nature.
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: Of these traffic rules because it flips.
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: Yes, if you reverse the direction of travel, the roles
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: perfectly reverse.
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: So if I drive east instead of north, suddenly the
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: down spin electrons get the smooth, paved highway and the
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: upspin electrons are forced onto the dirt road.
• 17:25
  Speaker 3: Yes, the spin preference alternates depending on the trajectory through
• 17:30
  Speaker 3: the brilliant zone. Brilliant zone, which is essentially the fundamental
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: map of this momentum space we've been talking about. Got
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: it and this alternating pattern, It isn't random, It forms
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: incredibly elegant geometric shapes in momentum.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: Space, like what kind of shapes?
• 17:46
  Speaker 3: Well, depending on the specific crystal, these spin split bands
• 17:49
  Speaker 3: form shapes that look like four leaf clovers, which we
• 17:52
  Speaker 3: call D wave symmetry, or even more complex six or
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: eight lobe shapes known as G wave or higher even parity.
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: Symmetries, like something out of a science fiction novel.
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: Honestly beautiful math.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: The material is passively patterning the behavior of electrons, creating
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: this alternating, multilobed filter of spin polarization.
• 18:11
  Speaker 3: But wait, I have a question about the actual mechanics of.
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: This, because for decades, whenever a physicists talked about coupling
• 18:17
  Speaker 2: an electron spin to its momentum, tying the compass needle
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: to the direction of travel, they relied on something called
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: spin orbit coupling.
• 18:25
  Speaker 3: Spin orbit coupling a very well established phenomenon.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: Yes, and from what I understand, spin orbit coupling generally
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: requires very heavy elements, right, You need materials like platinum
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: or bismuth or tungsten.
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: Yes, elements with massive nuclei.
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: Because the nucleus is so huge and highly charged. When
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: an electron whips around it at a significant fraction of
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: the speed of light, relativistic effects kick in exactly, the
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: electron essentially experiences the electric field of the nucleus as
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: a magnetic field, which then interacts with its spin. It
• 18:58
  Speaker 2: requires heavy microsky machinery to force the spin to care
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: about the orbit.
• 19:03
  Speaker 3: That was the accepted paradigm. If you want it strong
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: spin momentum locking, you absolutely needed heavy elements to generate
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: relativistic spin orbit.
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: Coupling, which is a pain right.
• 19:13
  Speaker 3: It is a massive headache for manufacturing because heavy elements
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: are often rare, they're expensive, and they're incredibly difficult to
• 19:20
  Speaker 3: integrate into standard silicon manufacturing processes.
• 19:23
  Speaker 2: But ultramagnets bypass this entirely.
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: That is the absolute shocker of this theoretical breakthrough. Wow,
• 19:30
  Speaker 3: the theorists prove that the massive spin splitting and ultramagnets,
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: these extreme alternating traffic rules, happens entirely without relativistic spin
• 19:40
  Speaker 3: orbit coupling.
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: It doesn't need the heavy elements at all.
• 19:43
  Speaker 3: It doesn't need them. It is driven purely by the
• 19:45
  Speaker 3: static electric fields and the geometric crystal symmetry of light
• 19:49
  Speaker 3: common elements.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: The geometry itself is doing all the heavy lifting. Yes,
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: it's achieving the impossible without needing the complex machinery. It
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: isn't acting like a ferromagnet when you look at electron trains,
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: giving you these strong polarized spin currents depending on the
• 20:04
  Speaker 2: direction you push the electrons. But to the outside world,
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: looking at the physical space, it is as quiet and
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: non magnetic as an anti ferromagnet.
• 20:13
  Speaker 3: It is the flawless solution to the Goldilocks problem. The
• 20:17
  Speaker 3: crystal itself acts like a highly sophisticated series of quantum.
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: Prisms, A quantum prism.
• 20:23
  Speaker 3: I like that from the outside, the crowd is pitch black,
• 20:26
  Speaker 3: But if you try to walk through the crowd, the
• 20:28
  Speaker 3: specific angle you walk dictates whether you get hit with
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: a blinding beam of uppolarized light or down polarized light.
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: That math is just stunning. The theory is so elegant,
• 20:38
  Speaker 2: But we both know that theoretical physics is absolutely littered
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: with beautiful math that turns out to be entirely fictitious
• 20:46
  Speaker 2: in the real world.
• 20:46
  Speaker 3: Oh, absolutely, string theory anyone.
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: Right, A pristine chalkboard equation doesn't build a faster smartphone.
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: So how did the scientific community actually move this from
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: a theoretical curiosity into undeniable physical reality Because this didn't
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: remain just a theory for very long now.
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: The turnaround was breathtakingly fast, and I think it's a
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: testament to how aggressively the material science community mobilized around this.
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Timeline wise, the theoretical framework solidified around twenty twenty
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: one and twenty twenty two, and.
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: By early twenty twenty four, experimentalists had published undeniable direct
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: proof that alter magnetism exists in real physical crystals.
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: That's basically overnight in physics terms.
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: It really is, and the tool they used to prove
• 21:28
  Speaker 3: it is a technique with a very intimidating name. It's
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: called angle resolved photo emission spectroscopy or a piece.
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: Okay, wait, you just dropped a massive acronym on me,
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: angle resolved.
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: What are piece?
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: If these materials look completely magnetically dead from the outside,
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: how does shining light on them tell us what their
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: internal quantum traffic rules are doing? Like break down how
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: Arpie's actually provides the proof here.
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: Sure, think of an airpiece machine as the ultimate pair
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: of quantum glasses. As you said, you can't just stick
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: a convey mentional magnetic probe onto the surface of an ultramagnet.
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: It will register zero net magnetization.
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: Because of the canceled out spins.
• 22:06
  Speaker 3: Right, so you have to interrogate the electrons themselves directly.
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: So researchers take the crystal and place it in an
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: ultra high vacuum chamber. Then they use a synchrotron, which
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: is a massive particle accelerator, to generate a beam of
• 22:21
  Speaker 3: incredibly intense, precisely tuned ultraviolet or X ray light.
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: Wait, we are hitting a tiny crystal with the output
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: of a particle accelerator.
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: We are blasting it with high energy photons.
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: Yes, that is intense.
• 22:35
  Speaker 3: And when those photons hit the surface of the crystal,
• 22:38
  Speaker 3: they interact to the electrons inside. If a photon has
• 22:41
  Speaker 3: enough energy, it transfers that energy to an electron, actually
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: breaking its bond to the atom and ejecting it completely
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: out of the material into the vacuum.
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: Okay, that sounds really familiar. That is the photoelectric effect, right,
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: It is the exact phenomenon Albert Einstein won his Nobel
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: Prize for explaining.
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: The very same. But an Rp's machine, it doesn't just
• 23:00
  Speaker 3: indiscriminately count the electrons flying off the surface. It is
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: far far more sophisticated. Oh so it features a highly
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: sensitive detector that measures two critical pieces of information. For
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: every single ejected electron, it measures its exact kinetic energy,
• 23:15
  Speaker 3: so how fast it's moving and the precise angle at
• 23:18
  Speaker 3: which it was ejected.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: Ah, I see where this is going. By measuring its
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: speed and trajectory as it leaves the crystal, you can
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: use the laws of conservation of energy and momentum to
• 23:28
  Speaker 2: reverse engineer exactly what that electron was doing before the
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: light hit it.
• 23:32
  Speaker 3: You are capturing a direct snapshot of the electron's life
• 23:35
  Speaker 3: inside the material. You are literally mapping momentum space in
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: real time.
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: That is brilliant.
• 23:41
  Speaker 3: By painstakingly measuring millions of these ejected electrons at different angles,
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: experimentalists built a visual map of the energy bands inside
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: the crystal.
• 23:50
  Speaker 2: They were looking for the traffic rules. They were looking
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: for the dirt road and the highway we talked.
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: About exactly, and when they pointed these massive arpiece machines
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: at a specific crystal called Mangani telluride abbreviated as Mkinese telluride,
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: they saw it perfectly.
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: They found it.
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: The data revealed the lifted Kramer's degeneracy. They visually confirmed
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: the spin.
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: Split bands unbelievable.
• 24:12
  Speaker 3: They could mathematically prove that electrons moving in one direction
• 24:16
  Speaker 3: through the manganese telluride had a vastly different energy profile
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: than electrons moving in another.
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: Direction, forming that exact alternating, multi lobed clover leaf pattern
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: the theorists predicted.
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: It was a flawless vindication of the math.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: Flawless, And this, I think leads to what is the
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: most dramatic irony in this entire scientific saga.
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: I know exactly what you're going to say.
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: You mentioned manganese telluride, and other early confirmed candidates included
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: ruthenrem dioxide and chromium antimenide. These aren't exotic, newly synthesized
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: compounds created in a multimillion dollar collider somewhere.
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: No, they're not.
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: These materials have been known for decades, it decades. How
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: is it possible that some of the most brilliant physicists
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: on on Earth had these exact materials sitting in their
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: labs for fifty years and totally missed this massive phenomenon.
• 25:06
  Speaker 3: It is a sobering reminder of how assumptions dictate discovery.
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: It really is, because they just assumed they were normal, exactly.
• 25:13
  Speaker 3: These materials were extensively studied in the twentieth century. We
• 25:17
  Speaker 3: mapped their crystal structures, we measured their electrical conductivity, and
• 25:20
  Speaker 3: because they exhibited zero external magnetic field, they were universally
• 25:25
  Speaker 3: classified as standard conventional anti feral magnets.
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: They were thrown into the second box.
• 25:30
  Speaker 3: You were thrown right into the second box. Physicists operated
• 25:34
  Speaker 3: under the premise that if the net magnetization is zero,
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: the internal spin dynamics across all momentum directions must perfectly
• 25:41
  Speaker 3: cancel out.
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: We assumed that because the outside was quiet, the inside
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: must be perfectly symmetric and mooring.
• 25:47
  Speaker 3: Right. They simply didn't possess the theoretical framework, the loophole
• 25:52
  Speaker 3: discovered by a mache Call and Sonova to even formulate
• 25:56
  Speaker 3: the question.
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: You can't look for something you don't know exists exactly.
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: They didn't know to ask whether momentum dependent spin splitting
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: could exist without heavy elements and spin orbit coupling. In science,
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: if your theoretical framework tells you a phenomenon is mathematically impossible,
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: you don't said grant money building a highly complex RPS
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: experiment to look for it.
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: No one's going to fund that exactly. It's like, I
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: have an analogy for this. It's like inheriting an old
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: house from your grandparents, living in it for fifty years,
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: and one day you casually lean against a bookshelf in
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: the living room and it swings open to reveal a massive,
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: high tech underground laboratory. I love that the lab was
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: there the entire time you were eating cereal in the kitchen.
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: You know, you just didn't know the hidden mechanism existed
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: to open the door.
• 26:42
  Speaker 3: The twenty twenty one theory was the blueprint to the
• 26:44
  Speaker 3: hidden mechanism, and arp HAS experiments were the act of
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: pushing the bookshelf.
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: Pushing the bookshelf, yes, And.
• 26:50
  Speaker 3: The moment that door swung open. I mean, the floodgates
• 26:53
  Speaker 3: of discovery just burst. It wasn't just an isolated quirk
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: in manganese.
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: Tell you're right, it wasn't a one off at all.
• 27:01
  Speaker 3: Once the material science community knew the geometric signatures to
• 27:05
  Speaker 3: look for, twenty twenty four and twenty twenty five saw
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: an absolute explosion of conformations.
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: They realized the hidden laboratory was connected to a global
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: tunnel network. Basically, they found ultramagnetic properties everywhere everywhere.
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: They found them in organic crystals which are heavily based
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: on carbon. Wow, they found them in pallic borides. They
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: discovered altramagnetism in complex layered two dimensional materials. They even
• 27:31
  Speaker 3: identified what are known as p wave variants in compounds
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: like nickel iodide, which exhibit even stranger and more complex
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: forms of symmetry breaking.
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: The kingdom of altramagnetism was vastly larger than anyone anticipated.
• 27:43
  Speaker 3: Much larger. It's everywhere.
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: But you know, discovering a cool physics trick in a
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: rock doesn't instantly change the world.
• 27:50
  Speaker 3: True.
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: To actually be useful for building computers, the material has
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: to be malleable, it has to be engineerable. And importantly,
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: the researchers proved they could synth this size these altramagnets
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: into incredibly thin films.
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: Right, Yes, that was a huge step.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: We're talking about taking chromium antimonide and growing it in
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: layers down to ten nanometers.
• 28:11
  Speaker 3: Thick ten nanometers.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: Why is that specific microscopic thickness such a crucial milestone?
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: Why does ten nanometers matter?
• 28:19
  Speaker 3: Because ten nanometers is the battleground of modern semiconductor manufacturing. Okay,
• 28:24
  Speaker 3: if you discover a material with miraculous quantum properties, but
• 28:28
  Speaker 3: those properties only exist when the material is a pristine,
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: bulky crystal the size of a paper weight. Well, it's
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: practically useless for commercial technology.
• 28:36
  Speaker 2: You can't put a paper weight in an iPhone exactly.
• 28:38
  Speaker 3: You cannot integrate a paper weight into the densely packed
• 28:42
  Speaker 3: architecture of a microprocessor. So by proving that the altramagnetic
• 28:46
  Speaker 3: spin splitting remains robust and highly functional when sliced down
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: to near atomic thinness, experimentalists prove that these materials are
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: fully compatible with nanoscale device integration.
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: They proved it can actually be built in to its ship. Yes,
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: and equally important, this isn't restricted to liquid helium temperatures, right,
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: because a lot of quantum breakthroughs sound amazing until you
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: read the fine print and realize it only works at
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: negative four hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit.
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: Which is the graveyard of so many promising materials.
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: Unfortunately, but ultramagnets survive.
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: They do. Several of these metallic ultmagots, including varieties of
• 29:20
  Speaker 3: ruthenium dioxide, have been proven to operate reliably at realm
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: temperature and ambient conditions. That is massive, they're stable, they
• 29:28
  Speaker 3: are microscopic. They are essentially ready for engineering.
• 29:32
  Speaker 2: Which brings us to the ultimate application.
• 29:34
  Speaker 3: Here.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: We have the material, we can see its traffic rules,
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: we can synthesize it thinly at room temperature. What exactly
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: is the technology we are going to build to replace
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: the silicon architectures that are currently hitting their physical limits.
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: The overatching term for this technological leap is spintronics.
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: Correct, Yes, spintronics is the revolution that aultermagnets were seemingly
• 29:57
  Speaker 3: tailored for.
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: So explain spintronic.
• 30:00
  Speaker 3: To fully appreciate why spintronics is necessary, we really have
• 30:04
  Speaker 3: to look critically at how the electronic device you're using
• 30:07
  Speaker 3: right now functions. Every piece of standard electronics from a
• 30:10
  Speaker 3: child's electronic toy to the most formidable artificial intelligence supercomputers
• 30:15
  Speaker 3: training large language models, they all rely entirely on manipulating
• 30:19
  Speaker 3: the charge.
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: Of the electron, moving negative electrical charge from point A
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: to point B. It's essentially plumbing, right. We use voltage
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: like a pump to push water through pipes.
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: A very apt mechanical analogy. Yes, we utilize voltage to
• 30:32
  Speaker 3: physically mechanically push electrons through the silicon pathways of a chip,
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: and the presence or absence of that electrical charge in
• 30:40
  Speaker 3: a capacitor or a transistor represents the ones and zeros
• 30:43
  Speaker 3: of our data. Simple enough, but physically shoving matter through
• 30:47
  Speaker 3: a solid lattice has a brutal inescapable consequence friction.
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: Because the electrons aren't traveling through empty space, They're navigating
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: a dense forest of atoms.
• 30:58
  Speaker 3: They collide with the atomic lattice, they scatter off impurities,
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: and every single collision generates kinetic energy, which manifests heat.
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: And heat is the ultimate enemy of modern computing.
• 31:08
  Speaker 3: It is the enemy.
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: It's why your laptop literally burns your legs if you
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: render a video. It's why massive data centers have to
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: be constructed in freezing climates or next to rivers, just
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: pumping thousands of gallons of water just to stop the
• 31:20
  Speaker 2: server racks from literally melting down.
• 31:22
  Speaker 3: It's a massive physical problem. We are reaching the bitter
• 31:26
  Speaker 3: end of Moore's law because we physically cannot pack silicon
• 31:30
  Speaker 3: transistors any closer together or run the voltage any faster
• 31:34
  Speaker 3: without the chips just combusting from the heat of the
• 31:37
  Speaker 3: moving charge.
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: We have hit the thermal wall exactly.
• 31:41
  Speaker 3: So the field of spintronics proposes a radical shift in architecture.
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: What if instead of burning mass amount of energy to
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: physically shove the electron across the chip to transmit information,
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: we leave the electron exactly where it is and we
• 31:54
  Speaker 3: simply flip its spin.
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: Oh, we manipulate the tiny compass needle instead of moving
• 31:59
  Speaker 2: the compass itself precisely. Wow.
• 32:02
  Speaker 3: If a compass needle pointing up is defined as a
• 32:04
  Speaker 3: one and a needle pointing down is a zero, we
• 32:07
  Speaker 3: can process and store highly complex information strictly by altering
• 32:12
  Speaker 3: the magnetic state of the stationary electrons.
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: And because they aren't moving.
• 32:16
  Speaker 3: Flipping a quantum spin requires orders of magnitude less energy
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: than pushing a physical charge across a barrier, and consequently
• 32:23
  Speaker 3: it produces virtually zero waste heat.
• 32:24
  Speaker 2: Let's upgrade our analogies here to really capture the difference,
• 32:27
  Speaker 2: because this is huge, Go for it. Traditional charge based
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: electronics are like moving information by having thousands of people
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: physically sprint from one end of a massive football stadium
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: to the other. There is chaos. People are bumping into
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: each other, everyone is exhausted, and it takes a huge
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: amount of energy to coordinate the movement. That's a friction, right,
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: But spintronics is like a stadium wave. The people never
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: leave their seats, they just stand up and sit down.
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: The up and down information travels instantly across the entire stadium,
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: but the physical infrastructure barely desserts any energy at all.
• 33:01
  Speaker 3: That perfectly illustrates the paradigm shift.
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: It really does, so why aren't we doing it?
• 33:06
  Speaker 3: The problem, however, is that while spintronics is a brilliant concept,
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: executing it has been incredibly difficult. We do actually have
• 33:13
  Speaker 3: primitive commercial spintronics right now, most notably m RAM magnetic
• 33:18
  Speaker 3: random access.
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: Memory, which uses traditional ferromagnets to store the ones and
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: zeros right yes.
• 33:23
  Speaker 3: And because it uses ferromagnets, MRAM is nonvolatile, it permanently
• 33:28
  Speaker 3: remembers the data even when you rip the power cord.
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: Out of the well, unlike the volatile RAM and a
• 33:33
  Speaker 2: standard computer that gets wiped clean every time it reboots.
• 33:36
  Speaker 3: Exactly. But because MRAM relies on ferromagnets, are blinding flashlight
• 33:41
  Speaker 3: crowd the cells actively interfere with each other.
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: The corosstalk is back.
• 33:46
  Speaker 3: The crosstalk prevents engineers from scaling MRAM down to the
• 33:49
  Speaker 3: ultra dense microscopic architecture needed to compete with standard silicon memory.
• 33:55
  Speaker 3: It is incredibly useful for niche applications, but it's too
• 33:59
  Speaker 3: bulky to be the universal memory of the future.
• 34:01
  Speaker 2: And as we establish earlier, you can't build memory out
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: of traditional antiferro magnets either, because they are too stubborn
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: to write to and impossible to read, which leads us
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: back to the hero of the story. Altramagnets are the
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: ultimate cheat code for the spintronics revolution.
• 34:17
  Speaker 3: They really are.
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: Let's break down exactly what they allow us to do,
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: starting with sheer processing speed.
• 34:22
  Speaker 3: The operational speed of an altermagnet is staggering because they
• 34:25
  Speaker 3: lack macroscopic magnetic fields. They don't experience the magnetic inertia,
• 34:30
  Speaker 3: the sluggishness that limits how fast a ferromagnet can flip
• 34:34
  Speaker 3: its state. Because of their unique internal spin dynamics, ultramagnets
• 34:38
  Speaker 3: operate natively at terror hertz frequencies.
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: We need to contextualize terror hurts for anyone who isn't
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: a computer hardware engineer. When you buy a high end
• 34:46
  Speaker 2: computer today, the processor speed is measured in gigahertz, say
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: four gigahertz. A single gigahertz is one babillion cycles per second.
• 34:55
  Speaker 2: A terror hertz is one trillion cycles per second exactly.
• 35:00
  Speaker 3: We are looking at a foundational material capable of switching
• 35:04
  Speaker 3: states roughly one thousand times faster than the absolute physical
• 35:09
  Speaker 3: limits of current silicon or ferromagnetic technology. A thousandfold increase
• 35:14
  Speaker 3: a thousandfold increase in base processing capability derived fundamentally from
• 35:19
  Speaker 3: swapping the material.
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: Architecture, a completely transformative leap and speed. But raw speed
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: is useless if you can't read the data efficiently.
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 35:27
  Speaker 2: You mentioned earlier that there is a way to electrically
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: read the spin state of these materials without using external magnets.
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: It's called the anomalous Hall effect, the anomalis Hall effect. Yes,
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: explain how that phenomenon solves the read problem.
• 35:38
  Speaker 3: Okay, So the standard Hall effect is a very old
• 35:41
  Speaker 3: principle used to measure magnetic fields. If you run an
• 35:45
  Speaker 3: electrical current through a simple conducting wire and you place
• 35:48
  Speaker 3: a strong magnet next to the wire, the magnetic field
• 35:52
  Speaker 3: exerts o Lorentz force on the moving electrons, pushing them
• 35:55
  Speaker 3: pushing them to one side of the wire. This creates
• 35:58
  Speaker 3: a tiny buildup of charge on one edge, which you
• 36:01
  Speaker 3: can easily measure with a voltmeter.
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: So magnetic field pushes the current sideways.
• 36:06
  Speaker 3: Yes, Now, in a standard ferromagnet you encounter the anomalous
• 36:11
  Speaker 3: Hall effect.
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: Okay, how is that different?
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: Because the ferromagnet generates its own massive internal magnetic field.
• 36:17
  Speaker 3: That internal field pushes the electrons to the side all
• 36:20
  Speaker 3: on its own. You don't need an external magnet. By
• 36:23
  Speaker 3: simply measuring the voltage across the edges of the tiny
• 36:26
  Speaker 3: memory cell, you immediately know if the internal magnetization is
• 36:31
  Speaker 3: pointing up or down. It gives you a clean electrical
• 36:34
  Speaker 3: readout of a magnetic state, which.
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: Is incredibly convenient for integrating into an electrical computer circuit.
• 36:40
  Speaker 2: But again, ferromagnets have the Messi stray fields that ruin
• 36:43
  Speaker 2: data density.
• 36:44
  Speaker 3: And this is where ultramagnets perform their greatest magic trick.
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: I'm ready.
• 36:48
  Speaker 3: They exhibit a strong anomalous Hall effect without possessing any
• 36:52
  Speaker 3: net external magnetization.
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: Wait, how does it push the electron sideways? If the
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: macroscopic magnetic field is exis exactly zero.
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: It relies entirely on those quantum traffic rules in momentum space.
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: The geometry again, the geometry again, the geometric symmetry of
• 37:08
  Speaker 3: the crystal lattice itself. The complex spin split bands deflects
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: the upspin electrons to one side of the material and
• 37:15
  Speaker 3: the down stin electrons to the other, creating a measurable
• 37:18
  Speaker 3: electrical voltage.
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: So the crystal's internal architecture is passively sorting the electrons,
• 37:24
  Speaker 2: giving the computer a perfectly clear, easily readable electrical signal
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: that tells you the state of the memory cell. Yes,
• 37:30
  Speaker 2: but if you hold a magnetometer next to it, the
• 37:32
  Speaker 2: cell is completely silent.
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: It perfectly solves the read out dilemma of anti ferromagnets
• 37:37
  Speaker 3: while rigorously maintaining their zero crosstalk high density advantage. It
• 37:42
  Speaker 3: is the best of both worlds unbelievable, and the control
• 37:45
  Speaker 3: mechanisms go even deeper, leading to a concept researchers called
• 37:48
  Speaker 3: spin faucets.
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: Okay, I have to admit, spin faucets sounds like something
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: you'd buy in a hardware store for a quantum plumbing project.
• 37:55
  Speaker 3: It does, doesn't it?
• 37:56
  Speaker 2: How do you try to spin on and off like
• 37:59
  Speaker 2: a fog?
• 38:00
  Speaker 3: The visual of the faucet is actually surprisingly accurate here
• 38:04
  Speaker 3: because the intense spin splitting in an ultramagnet is entirely
• 38:08
  Speaker 3: dependent on the specific direction the electron is traveling. Engineers
• 38:11
  Speaker 3: can leverage this to create pure streams of polarized spin.
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: If you push an unpolarized electrical current so fifty to
• 38:19
  Speaker 3: fifty mix of up and down spins through an ultramagnet
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: in a specific crystal direction, the traffic rules aggressively filter
• 38:26
  Speaker 3: the electrons. Okay, the downspins get caught in the high
• 38:30
  Speaker 3: resistance dirt road and they scatter while the upspins cruise
• 38:33
  Speaker 3: down the highway. What emerges out the other side is
• 38:36
  Speaker 3: a highly polarized, pure upspin current.
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: You filtered the water exactly.
• 38:40
  Speaker 3: You filtered it. But the brilliant part is the control.
• 38:43
  Speaker 3: If you change the direction of the input current, say
• 38:46
  Speaker 3: you turn the faucet handle ninety degrees and push the
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: current along a different crystal axis, the traffic rules dictate
• 38:52
  Speaker 3: that the polarization vanishes or it switches or perfectly switches
• 38:56
  Speaker 3: to a pure down spin current.
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: So you have instantaneous, highly efficient electrical control over the
• 39:02
  Speaker 2: flow of quantum spin information without ever needing bulky external
• 39:07
  Speaker 2: magnetic fields or heavy spin orbit coupling materials to manipulate
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: the current.
• 39:12
  Speaker 3: When you extrapolate the combination of all these traits, the
• 39:15
  Speaker 3: terror herd switching speeds, the dense zero crosstalk memory, effortless
• 39:20
  Speaker 3: electrical readout via the anomalous Hall effect, and instant electrical
• 39:24
  Speaker 3: control through spin faucets. You really begin to see the
• 39:27
  Speaker 3: blueprint for the next century of computing. It's all right there,
• 39:31
  Speaker 3: and the timing of this discovery could not be more critical,
• 39:34
  Speaker 3: because the current technological landscape is facing an absolute existential
• 39:39
  Speaker 3: crisis regarding energy.
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: You're talking about the immense bottleneck in artificial intelligence hardware.
• 39:44
  Speaker 3: Yes, the sheer scale of modern AI is breaking standard
• 39:47
  Speaker 3: silicon architecture.
• 39:49
  Speaker 2: It really is.
• 39:49
  Speaker 3: When you query a large language model, the computer is
• 39:52
  Speaker 3: constantly shuttling astronomically large data sets back and forth between
• 39:57
  Speaker 3: the processing unit and the memory unit.
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: Because there's brit physical things on the board.
• 40:01
  Speaker 3: Exactly, and because they use standard charge based electronics. This
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: constant physical movement of electrons is brutally slow compared to
• 40:11
  Speaker 3: the processing speed, and it consumes catastrophic amounts of electrical power.
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: We are reaching a point where tech companies are literally
• 40:18
  Speaker 2: investing in dedicated nuclear power plants just to supply enough
• 40:22
  Speaker 2: electricity to run their AI server. Farms. It's a global
• 40:25
  Speaker 2: energy crisis masquerading as a technological boom.
• 40:29
  Speaker 3: The trajectory is completely unsustainable. But if you rip out
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: the standard silicon memory and the standard logic gates and
• 40:37
  Speaker 3: replace them with ultra dense ultramagnetic spintronics, you fundamentally rewrite
• 40:41
  Speaker 3: the energy equation.
• 40:42
  Speaker 2: Tell me how.
• 40:43
  Speaker 3: First, because ultramagnets are non volatile, you can integrate the
• 40:47
  Speaker 3: memory directly on top of the processing logic. You eliminate
• 40:50
  Speaker 3: the physical distance that data has to travel.
• 40:52
  Speaker 2: Oh wow, the processor and the memory become the exact
• 40:55
  Speaker 2: same neighborhood exactly.
• 40:57
  Speaker 3: Second, you run that integrated system at tearhurt speeds, forming
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: operations one thousand times faster. And Third, because the entire
• 41:04
  Speaker 3: architecture relies on flipping localized spins rather than continuously shoving
• 41:08
  Speaker 3: electrical charge through a resistive lattice, the total power consumption plummets.
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: It is the ultimate engineering trifecta there really is. You
• 41:17
  Speaker 2: make the device vastly smaller because there is no crosstalk,
• 41:20
  Speaker 2: You make it exponentially faster because it operates at terror
• 41:23
  Speaker 2: huts frequencies, And you make it profoundly more energy efficient
• 41:27
  Speaker 2: because it generates almost no heat.
• 41:29
  Speaker 3: It shatters the agonizing trade offs that have defined hardware
• 41:33
  Speaker 3: engineering for fifty years.
• 41:34
  Speaker 2: So given all of this, given that we have the
• 41:36
  Speaker 2: mathematical proof, we have the ARPS visual proof, and the
• 41:40
  Speaker 2: undeniable mechanical advantages, the burning question for anyone listening has
• 41:44
  Speaker 2: to be why isn't every new smartphone already powered by ultramagnets.
• 41:49
  Speaker 3: That's a billion dollar question.
• 41:51
  Speaker 2: If it is the ultimate cheat code, what is causing
• 41:53
  Speaker 2: the delay?
• 41:54
  Speaker 3: Because the path from a nobel worthy physics discovery to
• 41:58
  Speaker 3: a commercial product on a best buy shit shelf is
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: notoriously brutal. In material science, we actually call this the
• 42:04
  Speaker 3: value of death.
• 42:05
  Speaker 2: The value of death.
• 42:05
  Speaker 3: It is the agonizing gap between proving a concept in
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: a pristine laboratory and reliably mass producing it for the
• 42:13
  Speaker 3: global market. We have to confront the harsh engineering realities
• 42:17
  Speaker 3: of commercializing an entirely new kingdom of materials.
• 42:21
  Speaker 2: Let's walk through the valley of death, then, Because the
• 42:23
  Speaker 2: universe never just hands over a trillion dollar technological leap
• 42:26
  Speaker 2: without a fight, the very first hurdle has to be synthesis, right,
• 42:31
  Speaker 2: growing the crystals.
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: Synthesis at scale is an immense challenge. I mean It's
• 42:35
  Speaker 3: an incredible achievement for a PhD student to painstakingly grow
• 42:39
  Speaker 3: a tiny, structurally perfect microscopic flake of chromium antimonide inside
• 42:44
  Speaker 3: a multimillion dollar molecular bean epidaxy chamber, carefully keeping it
• 42:48
  Speaker 3: under an ultra high vacuum for an air peace experiment.
• 42:50
  Speaker 5: Right, that's lab conditions, But it is a fundamentally different
• 42:53
  Speaker 5: universe of engineering to design a commercial fabrication plant capable
• 42:57
  Speaker 5: of reliably depositing billions of flawless ultramagtic memory cells onto
• 43:01
  Speaker 5: a three hundred millimeter silicon wafer, processing thousands of wafers
• 43:05
  Speaker 5: a day with a zero percent failure rate.
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: It's the difference between like a master chef spending four
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: hours making one Michelin star siufle and a global fast
• 43:14
  Speaker 2: food chain trying to engineer a machine that can flawlessly
• 43:17
  Speaker 2: replicate that exact sufle a billion times a day. The
• 43:22
  Speaker 2: scaling requires totally different methodologies.
• 43:25
  Speaker 3: That's a great way to put it, and the margin
• 43:26
  Speaker 3: for error is essentially.
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: Zero because of the symmetry exactly.
• 43:31
  Speaker 3: Remember, the entire phenomenon of ultramagnetism relies on the absolute
• 43:35
  Speaker 3: precision of the crystal symmetries. If the manufacturing process introduces
• 43:39
  Speaker 3: tiny microscopic defects, missing atom here, a misaligned grain boundary there,
• 43:44
  Speaker 3: it disrupts the delicate momentum space traffic rules.
• 43:47
  Speaker 2: The spin splitting collapses, The.
• 43:49
  Speaker 3: Spin splitting collapses, and your miraculous quantum material turns back
• 43:52
  Speaker 3: into a useless, boring piece of rock.
• 43:55
  Speaker 2: So manufacturing perfection is hurdle one. Then there is the
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: environment hurdle, touched on the fact that some of these
• 44:01
  Speaker 2: metallic ultramagnets operate at room temperature. But that isn't universally
• 44:05
  Speaker 2: true across the board, is it.
• 44:06
  Speaker 3: No, it is not. Ensuring robust room temperature operation across
• 44:10
  Speaker 3: a much wider variety of these compounds is a critical
• 44:13
  Speaker 3: focus right now.
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: Why do we need so many different varieties?
• 44:17
  Speaker 3: Well, to build complex modern circuits, engineers can't just use
• 44:21
  Speaker 3: one type of metal. They need an entire diverse library
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: of ultramagnetic materials. They need some that act as perfect conductors,
• 44:29
  Speaker 3: some that act as highly tunable semiconductors, and some that
• 44:32
  Speaker 3: act as rigid insulators to block currents.
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: You need a full toolbox of materials to build a house,
• 44:38
  Speaker 2: not just one type of wood.
• 44:39
  Speaker 3: Exactly right now, researchers are aggressively expanding the library of
• 44:43
  Speaker 3: room temperature candidates, but that library needs to be significantly larger,
• 44:48
  Speaker 3: and the magnetic states need to remain incredibly robust to
• 44:51
  Speaker 3: handle the fluctuating thermal environments inside a functioning, heavily utilized
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: computer chip.
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: And what about the interface problem. We talked about spin
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: faucets and using electrical currents to flip the spins, but
• 45:03
  Speaker 2: at a commercial scale, getting precise control over billions of
• 45:06
  Speaker 2: cells must be staggeringly complex.
• 45:09
  Speaker 3: Interface physics is currently one of the hottest areas of research.
• 45:12
  Speaker 3: Achieving reliable electrical or optical control over the ultramagnetic order,
• 45:17
  Speaker 3: basically forcing it to flip back and forth billions of
• 45:20
  Speaker 3: times a second without degrading or failing, requires mastering what
• 45:24
  Speaker 3: happens at the boundary line.
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: The boundary line, yeah.
• 45:27
  Speaker 3: You eventually have to connect these quantum altmagnets to standard
• 45:31
  Speaker 3: conventional metals like copper or gold to get the signal
• 45:34
  Speaker 3: out to the rest of the computer. The atomic boundary
• 45:37
  Speaker 3: between a normal metal and an altramagnet is chaotic, and
• 45:40
  Speaker 3: it can disrupt the spin polarization.
• 45:42
  Speaker 2: So the scientific community is staring down the valley of
• 45:45
  Speaker 2: death but they aren't just sitting around writing grant proposals
• 45:48
  Speaker 2: and hoping for a lucky break. Right. How are researchers
• 45:52
  Speaker 2: actively attacking these synthesis and interface hurdles.
• 45:55
  Speaker 3: They are deploying incredibly sophisticated materials science techniques. The most
• 46:00
  Speaker 3: promising avenues currently being explored is strain engineering.
• 46:04
  Speaker 2: Strain engineering does that literally mean they are physically stretching
• 46:07
  Speaker 2: or squeezing the crystal lattice.
• 46:10
  Speaker 3: That is precisely what it means, because the alternating traffic
• 46:13
  Speaker 3: rules of an ultramagnet are dictated entirely by the precise
• 46:16
  Speaker 3: geometric distance and angle between the atoms. Researchers found that
• 46:21
  Speaker 3: if you force the crystal to grow on top of
• 46:23
  Speaker 3: a foundational substrate that has a slightly different atomic spacing,
• 46:27
  Speaker 3: the ultramagnet is forced to stretch or compress to match
• 46:31
  Speaker 3: its foundation.
• 46:32
  Speaker 2: You are intentionally warping the crystal.
• 46:34
  Speaker 3: You artificially tune the symmetry. By applying just a tiny
• 46:38
  Speaker 3: bit of physical strain engineers can artificially enhance the spin splitting,
• 46:43
  Speaker 3: force the spin currents to flow more efficiently, or even
• 46:46
  Speaker 3: push the thermal stability of the material to operate at
• 46:49
  Speaker 3: much higher temperatures.
• 46:50
  Speaker 2: You are literally grabbing the quantum highway and bending it
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: to force the electrons to behave exactly how you want
• 46:56
  Speaker 2: them to. That is phenomenal. What other techniques are they using.
• 46:59
  Speaker 3: They're heavily utilize in doping, which is a classic semiconductor technique.
• 47:03
  Speaker 6: Like adding impurities right, This involves intentionally introducing minuscule amounts
• 47:09
  Speaker 6: of foreign atoms, like say, injecting a few atoms of
• 47:12
  Speaker 6: iron into a manganese lattice to subtly alter the electron
• 47:16
  Speaker 6: density and artificially stabilize the desired magnetic phases.
• 47:20
  Speaker 3: They are also constructing incredibly complex heterostructures.
• 47:24
  Speaker 2: Heterostructures meaning stacking different materials like a microscopic sandwich.
• 47:27
  Speaker 3: Exactly, they will stack a microscopically thin layer of an
• 47:30
  Speaker 3: ultramagnet directly adjacent to a layer of heavy metal or
• 47:34
  Speaker 3: even the superconductor.
• 47:35
  Speaker 2: To what end.
• 47:36
  Speaker 3: By creating these quantum sandwiches, the unique properties of one
• 47:40
  Speaker 3: layer can bleed across the atomic boundary into the next
• 47:43
  Speaker 3: layer via proximity effects, allowing for much easier electrical control
• 47:47
  Speaker 3: of the stubborn ultramagnetic state.
• 47:49
  Speaker 2: And we cannot ignore the role that artificial intelligence is
• 47:52
  Speaker 2: playing in solving its own hardware crisis. I mean AI
• 47:55
  Speaker 2: isn't just the final customer waiting for a faster spentronic chip.
• 47:59
  Speaker 2: It is actively being used to design the show.
• 48:02
  Speaker 3: Yes, the acceleration provided by AI is arguably the only
• 48:05
  Speaker 3: reason this field is moving so incredibly fast. Researchers are
• 48:09
  Speaker 3: using high throughput computational screening driven by advanced machine learning
• 48:13
  Speaker 3: models to bypass years of trial and error chemistry. Instead
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: of spending six months physically synthesizing a random chemical compound
• 48:21
  Speaker 3: in a lab to see if it exhibits ultramagnetism, the
• 48:25
  Speaker 3: AI can virtually simulate tens of thousands of complex crystal
• 48:28
  Speaker 3: structures in a matter of days.
• 48:30
  Speaker 2: It calculates the math before the rock ever physically exists.
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: It computes the band structures, It maps the momentum space,
• 48:37
  Speaker 3: and accurately predicts which hypothetical materials will exhibit the strongest
• 48:42
  Speaker 3: ultramagnetic properties before a single researcher ever puts on a
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: lab code.
• 48:47
  Speaker 2: That's incredible.
• 48:48
  Speaker 3: This AI screening is identifying dozens of highly promising new candidates,
• 48:52
  Speaker 3: discovering materials that range from perfect insulators to incredibly exotic
• 48:57
  Speaker 3: phases like potential topological supercondict.
• 49:00
  Speaker 2: It's a profound feedback loop. We are utilizing the current
• 49:03
  Speaker 2: generation of AI to discover the quantum materials required to
• 49:06
  Speaker 2: physically build the next generation of AI.
• 49:08
  Speaker 3: It is and the momentum building in the global scientific
• 49:11
  Speaker 3: community is undeniable. If you look at the major roadmaps
• 49:15
  Speaker 3: for the semiconductor industry over the next decade, or look
• 49:18
  Speaker 3: at the agendas for massive international engineering conferences like the
• 49:23
  Speaker 3: IE events in twenty twenty five and twenty twenty six,
• 49:26
  Speaker 3: Ultramagnetism is no longer a fringe theoretical topic.
• 49:29
  Speaker 2: It's mainstream.
• 49:30
  Speaker 3: It is taking center stage. Billions of dollars in research funding,
• 49:34
  Speaker 3: both public and private, are violently pivoting towards this field.
• 49:38
  Speaker 2: It has undeniably become the central focus of condensed matter physics.
• 49:41
  Speaker 2: It is a global race to secure the foundational patents
• 49:44
  Speaker 2: of the post silicon era. Absolutely, but taking a step
• 49:47
  Speaker 2: back and looking at the commercial realities is the integration step,
• 49:51
  Speaker 2: the most difficult part of this entire endeavor. I mean,
• 49:54
  Speaker 2: we've spent the last fifty years and literally trillions of
• 49:57
  Speaker 2: dollars building a global infrastructure optimized exclusively for manufacturing silicon chin.
• 50:02
  Speaker 2: Thus we have it is the most complex supply chain
• 50:04
  Speaker 2: in human history. Are we fundamentally trying to drop a
• 50:08
  Speaker 2: futuristic warp drive into a nineteen ninety Sedan.
• 50:12
  Speaker 3: That is the multi billion dollar tension right there. The
• 50:15
  Speaker 3: global semiconductor industry is notoriously fundamentally conservative, and.
• 50:20
  Speaker 2: They have to be because it's expensive.
• 50:22
  Speaker 3: A single state of the art silicon fabrication plant costs
• 50:26
  Speaker 3: upwards of twenty billion dollars to construct. They simply will
• 50:30
  Speaker 3: not throw away that infrastructure to accommodate a new material
• 50:34
  Speaker 3: unless it can be adapted to their existing machines.
• 50:36
  Speaker 2: So that's the workaround.
• 50:38
  Speaker 3: The sheer brilliance of the current approach to altarmagnets is
• 50:41
  Speaker 3: that researchers are hyper focused on thin films and materials
• 50:45
  Speaker 3: that can be deposited using sputtering techniques or chemical vapor deposition,
• 50:49
  Speaker 3: which are the exact same machines currently sitting in those
• 50:53
  Speaker 3: twenty billion dollar fabs.
• 50:54
  Speaker 2: Oh, so they aren't trying to replace the sedan. They
• 50:58
  Speaker 2: are engineering the warp drive so it's directly onto the
• 51:01
  Speaker 2: sedan's existing engine mounts.
• 51:03
  Speaker 3: That is the ultimate goal. They want to seamlessly integrate
• 51:06
  Speaker 3: highly efficient ultramagnetic memory cells directly on top of traditional,
• 51:11
  Speaker 3: mature silicon logic architectures. It represents an evolutionary, manageable step
• 51:16
  Speaker 3: in commercial manufacturing, but a revolutionary paradigm shattering leap in
• 51:21
  Speaker 3: computational performance.
• 51:22
  Speaker 2: It is genuinely incredible. We're watching the real time, messy,
• 51:27
  Speaker 2: complicated birth of an entirely new era of human technology.
• 51:31
  Speaker 2: So let's take a moment to pull all of these
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: complex threads together. Let's recap the profound journey we have
• 51:37
  Speaker 2: just explored.
• 51:37
  Speaker 3: Okay, let's recap. We begin with a foundational century old assumption,
• 51:41
  Speaker 3: a rigid binary classification system defining magnetism, the two box.
• 51:45
  Speaker 3: You had the ferromagnet, the loud, strong material with a
• 51:48
  Speaker 3: massive external field that ruined data density, and you had
• 51:51
  Speaker 3: the anti ferromagnet, the quiet, stubborn material with zero external
• 51:55
  Speaker 3: field that was incredibly dense but practically impossible to read
• 51:58
  Speaker 3: it right too.
• 51:58
  Speaker 2: A classification system that stood entirely unbroken and unquestioned for
• 52:02
  Speaker 2: generations until we saw a masterful theoretical breakthrough in the
• 52:06
  Speaker 2: early twenty twenties.
• 52:07
  Speaker 3: A realization by theorists that by abandoning physical space and
• 52:11
  Speaker 3: interrogating momentum space by mapping how electrons move and wave,
• 52:16
  Speaker 3: rather than just where they are. A massive loophole in
• 52:18
  Speaker 3: the universe's symmetry rules appeared.
• 52:20
  Speaker 2: Which led directly to the conceptualization of ultramagnets, a third,
• 52:24
  Speaker 2: previously unmapped kingdom of materials that successfully hides massive ferromagnet
• 52:30
  Speaker 2: like spin polarization inside a perfectly quiet anti ferromagnet like exterior.
• 52:36
  Speaker 3: They violently split electron spins into separate lanes based purely
• 52:39
  Speaker 3: on their direction of travel, completely bypassing the need for heavy,
• 52:43
  Speaker 3: expensive elements or relativistic spin orbit coupling.
• 52:46
  Speaker 2: And we explored how experimentalists rapidly validated this wild math
• 52:50
  Speaker 2: using rpas blasting crystals with synchrotron light to literally photograph
• 52:54
  Speaker 2: the quantu of traffic rules.
• 52:55
  Speaker 3: In doing so, they realized that these world changing materials
• 52:58
  Speaker 3: have been sitting on mundane laboratory for fifty years, masquerating
• 53:01
  Speaker 3: as boring rocks.
• 53:02
  Speaker 2: And finally, we explored how these precise materials are the
• 53:05
  Speaker 2: missing key to the spentronics revolution. They offer a tangible
• 53:09
  Speaker 2: path to integrated computing architectures that switch at terror Hurtz frequencies,
• 53:14
  Speaker 2: consume a fraction of the energy, and possess the capability
• 53:17
  Speaker 2: to save Moore's law and power the AI driven future.
• 53:22
  Speaker 3: The entire saga is a profound testament to the idea
• 53:25
  Speaker 3: that physics and our understanding of the universe is never
• 53:28
  Speaker 3: truly finished. There are always massive blind spots. They are
• 53:32
  Speaker 3: always foundational assumptions that desperately need to be challenged. The
• 53:36
  Speaker 3: discovery of alter magnets proves that by simply looking at
• 53:39
  Speaker 3: an old settled problem through a slightly shifted mathematical lens,
• 53:43
  Speaker 3: we can uncover physical phenomena that completely rewrite the boundaries
• 53:47
  Speaker 3: of what human technology can achieve.
• 53:48
  Speaker 2: Which leaves us with a deeply lingering, almost uncomfortable, mind
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: expanding thought. Oh, think about the sheer magnitude of what
• 53:56
  Speaker 2: just happened. A fundamental property of the physical universe, a massive, distinct,
• 54:01
  Speaker 2: third category of magnetism, hid right under the noses of
• 54:04
  Speaker 2: the most brilliant scientists in history for over a century.
• 54:07
  Speaker 2: Did And it didn't hide because it was invisible or
• 54:09
  Speaker 2: because it required a particle accelerator the size of the
• 54:12
  Speaker 2: galaxy to create. It hid simply because human beings were
• 54:16
  Speaker 2: applying the wrong assumptions about geometric symmetry. We were so
• 54:19
  Speaker 2: confident we knew all the rules. We didn't bother to
• 54:22
  Speaker 2: design an experiment to look for the exceptions.
• 54:24
  Speaker 3: I thought we had it all figured out.
• 54:26
  Speaker 2: So if a revolution capable of redefining global computing could
• 54:30
  Speaker 2: be sitting quietly inside a gray piece of manganese telluride
• 54:34
  Speaker 2: for fifty years, what other mundane objects harbor world breaking
• 54:38
  Speaker 2: quantum secrets. Could the standard glass in your window, the
• 54:42
  Speaker 2: simple copper wire running through your walls, or yes, even
• 54:45
  Speaker 2: the perfectly ordinary, unremarkable magnets holding up the grocery lists
• 54:49
  Speaker 2: on your refrigerator possess hidden dimensions of quantum physics that
• 54:53
  Speaker 2: we simply haven't thought to look for.
• 54:54
  Speaker 3: Yet. That's a great question.
• 54:56
  Speaker 2: What other deeply held assumptions are currently blinding us to
• 54:59
  Speaker 2: the next sen of human progress? Because if there is
• 55:02
  Speaker 2: one permanent lesson the discovery of altramagnets has taught us,
• 55:06
  Speaker 2: it is that the physical universe is far richer, far stranger,
• 55:09
  Speaker 2: and far more full of hidden potential than our textbooks
• 55:12
  Speaker 2: have ever led us to believe. The quiet revelation in
• 55:15
  Speaker 2: magnetism isn't the end of a chapter. It is just
• 55:18
  Speaker 2: the beginning