A new type of fractal has been discovered in magnetic ice: ScienceAlert

Fractal patterns can be found everywhere from snowflakes to snowflakes Lightning to the jagged edges of coastlines. Beautiful to see, their recurring nature can also inspire mathematical insights into the chaos of the landscape.

A new example of this mathematical anomaly has been revealed in a type of magnetic material known as spin ice, and it could help us better understand how a strange behavior called magnetic monopoles emerges from its unstable structure.

Spin ices are magnetic crystals that are subject to structural rules similar to water ice, with unique interactions governed by the spins of their electrons rather than the pushing and pulling of charges. As a result of this activity, they do not have any single low-energy state of minimal activity. Instead, they almost make noise, even at extremely low temperatures.

A strange phenomenon emerges from this quantum resonance – properties that act like magnets with only one pole. While they are not completely virtual magnetic monopolar particles Some physicists think they may exist in nature, they behave in a similar enough way that they are worth studying.

So an international team of researchers recently turned their attention to a spinning ice called dysprosium titanate. When small amounts of heat are applied to the material, its typical magnetic bases are broken and monopoles appear, with the north and south poles separated and operating independently.

several years ago A team of researchers has identified distinct unipolar magnetic activity in the quantum resonance of spinning ice of dysprosium titanate, but the results leave some questions about the exact nature of these unipolar motions.

In this follow-up study, physicists realized that monopoles don’t move with them Total freedom in three dimensions. Instead, they were restricted to a 2.53 dimension level within a fixed lattice.

The scientists created complex models at the atomic level to show that unipolar motion was constrained by a fractal pattern that was erased and rewritten depending on previous conditions and motions.

“When we inserted this into our models, the fractals appeared immediately,” says physicist Jonathan Hallen from the University of Cambridge.

“The configurations of the spins were creating a network that the monads had to navigate. The network was a branching fractal of exactly the right dimension.”

This dynamic behavior explains why fractals were previously overlooked by classical experiments. It was the hype created around the monopoles that eventually revealed what they were really doing and the fractal pattern they were following.

“We knew something really strange was going on,” he said. says physicist Claudio Castelnovo from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. “The results from 30 years of experimentation haven’t worked.”

“After several failed attempts to explain the results of noise, we finally had a eureka moment, realizing that monopoles must live in a fractal world and not move freely in three dimensions, as has always been assumed.”

These kinds of breakthroughs could lead to incremental changes in the possibilities of science and how materials like spin ice can be used: possibly in spintronicsan emerging field of study that could offer a next-generation upgrade on the electronics we use today.

“Besides explaining many puzzling experimental results that have challenged us for so long, the discovery of a mechanism for the emergence of a new type of fractal has led to a completely unexpected trajectory of unconventional motion occurring in three dimensions,” says theoretical physicist Roderich Mossner from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany.

Research published in Sciences.