Magnetized Gas Points to New Physics

It would be tough to stick it to your refrigerator, but an ultra-cold gas magnetizes itself just as do metals such as iron or nickel, a team of atomic physicists reports. That cool trick shows that the messy physics within solids can be modeled with pristine gases, the researchers say. But others are skeptical that the team has actually seen what they claim.

Condensed matter physicists can tell you essentially all there is to know about how common metals carry electricity and heat. Why some of them are magnetic is a trickier question. Physicists know the basics: The electrons that flow through iron, nickel, and other magnetic materials act like little bar magnets. Below a certain temperature the electrons align so that they all point in the same direction, at least within relatively large "domains" in the crystalline material. The question is why do the electrons align themselves?

An answer was proposed in the 1930s by British theorist E. C. Stoner. It depends on a key bit of quantum mechanics called the Pauli exclusion principle, which says that no two electrons can be in exactly the same condition or "quantum state" at the same time. To see how this works, first consider a nonmagnetic metal. The electrons can be thought of as a kind of gas within the solid, with equal numbers of electrons pointing with their north poles up as down, because that would be their lowest-energy state.

Electrons repel each other, which increases the energy of the gas. Stoner argued that if the electrons repel each other hard enough, they could lower their total energy by aligning. The flipping of some of the electrons would agitate the gas and increase its "kinetic" energy a bit. But because of the exclusion principle, no two aligned electrons could be in the same place at the same time, meaning the electrons would avoid each other so that energy from the short-range repulsion would drop even more. Stoner came up with a highly simplified mathematical model that encapsulates this idea. However, no one has ever rigorously proved that the model produces such alignment or "ferromagnetism."

via Magnetized Gas Points to New Physics -- Cho 2009 (918): 1 -- ScienceNOW.