In the summer of 2022, two doctoral students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Tianchuang Luo and Batyr Ilyas, are perplexed. Before their eyes, a non-magnetic material subjected to a laser has just reached a magnetic state which lasts, even after the laser is turned off, for two milliseconds. That doesn’t seem like much, but it’s nevertheless a record.
“At first we thought it was an error in the signals displayed on our screens. Then the phenomenon happened again. It took us time and many discussions with our colleagues to understand what was happening”they relate. This work, the result of an international collaboration between 11 researchers at MIT, Seoul National University, the University of the Basque Country, the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg and the Flatiron Institute in New York, was the subject of a publication on December 18 in the journal Nature.
The surprise of the two doctoral students comes from the fact that the material in which they were interested, iron phosphorus trisulfide (FePS3composed of sulfur, iron and phosphorus), has very particular magnetic properties. In its atoms, each electron behaves like a small magnet that points in the opposite direction from its neighbor, making the magnetization zero on the macroscopic scale. It is said to be antiferromagnetic. A classic magnet, on the contrary, is ferromagnetic.
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