> scientists believe antiferromagnetic materials could be a more robust alternative to existing magnetic-based storage technologies
Scientists working on interesting anti-ferromagnetic materials need a justification for doing so under the crazy grant system we operate, more like.
The downside of antiferromagnetic data storage, or skyrmion storage, or any of the other various ideas recently, is that reading the data is very difficult even if it is present, to the point of making a real world device pretty much practically impossible. I know, I also worked on this sort of thing before leaving academia!
Knowledge in itself is good. We don’t need everything to have a direct commercial application. In fact most discoveries by their nature do not have directly applicable commercial applications.
Because those who pay for the taxes frequently don't. So some justification needs to happen to spend other peoples money. A better way would be nice, though.
This is a popular argument but there are plenty of things that cost orders of magnitude more taxes that go towards projects that lots of people don’t agree with. Americas trillion dollar war machine for example.
Well put. But, of course many on here don't have time for the concerns of simpleton non-elites, and whether they should have a say about where their money goes; I've noticed lately I look for the greyed out comments first on HN.
It would be nice if the research could be just for the general public good instead of having to have an explicit use for the military to get the money.
Imagine how much better it would’ve been if not for the military involvement. Imagine how many things developed purely to enhance the efficiency of destroying other humans could have been developed instead to enhance and improve lives instead. So many trillions wasted on imaginary borders and in service of imaginary friends over the last… ever.
How do you explain scientific advancement in less armed nations? Some of the most advanced research in the world happens in states with incredibly small forces.
Perhaps you've confused the economic advantage of a militaristic state with a connection between military science and progress.
For example, the space program basically died when the Cold War ended and it took a long time for it to restart and we still have yet to achieve things in the commercial space that the government could do in the 60s like reach our nearest satellite. Same goes for the cancellation of the SSC which could have achieved what the LHC discovered but 10 years earlier. Saying that other states are making discoveries is ignoring the fact that it takes them longer to achieve those goals than with the military or other emergency situation propelling them forward.
Certainly all of the rapid progress of the 20th century was because of military funding. The Cold War made it quite clear how when you drastically changed priorities how quickly various programs started getting canceled and our achievements started falling away (eg beating Soviets to space killed any desire of either party to continue, the Cold War ending killed the SSC, etc). You have WW2 to thank for nuclear technology, lasers, rapid advancements in aircraft, modern cryptography and directly leading to the space race. Even QM takes on military funding to take it from niche curiosity to applied research and real world impact. It’s all indelibly linked.
I’m not sure why you’re having such a reaction to a pretty mundane observation that military funding on technology gets further and faster than the civilians can. Heck go look at how far military is in the math behind cryptography consistently comparing discoveries civilians make and when we learn the military had that tech once it’s declassified decades later.
> I’m not sure why you’re having such a reaction to a pretty mundane observation that military funding on technology gets further and faster than the civilians can
Because it is just plain wrong. And it glorifies military spending and war. Just because the military complex has so much money that their spare change dwarfs many other sources of research funding doesn't mean it is money that couldn't have been used much more efficiently if it was spent wisely from the start.
And about the plain wrong part:
> You have WW2 to thank for nuclear technology,
The fundamental research was done before the war by the international scientific community, and in particular people from Germany and Italy. The hard part done during the Manhattan project was to develop the industrial processes to produce enough fissile material to make the bombs, but making the bombs from that was fairly trivial.
> lasers
Were first created in 1961.
> the space race.
It has been argued that the reason we stopped going to the moon and beyond is that the rush during the Cold War made it too expensive to continue. A more paced development would have been sustainable and would have gone much further.
> Even QM takes on military funding to take it from niche curiosity to applied research and real world impact.
Why do you think so?
In the end, imagine a world where even a fraction of all the money spent on military was spent on research directly instead.
> Because it is just plain wrong. And it glorifies military spending and war. Just because the military complex has so much money that their spare change dwarfs many other sources of research funding doesn't mean it is money that couldn't have been used much more efficiently if it was spent wisely from the start.
And yet time and time again, funding follows the military. I don't disagree it's an economics problem. I'm just highlighting that historically large groups of people generally aren't fans of "lets spend money on science" but are more OK with it being laundered through the military under the guise of defense. I'm passing no moral judgement nor glorifying. I'm simply representing how people as groups have behaved historically. It's irrelevant where/when the fundamental research was done. Applied science is a critical component in the flywheel for research as it enables new instruments, equipment, and more understanding of the problems with theoretical research when models and reality disagree. Modern fundamental research in astrophysics today would not be possible without the applied research that was carried on the backs of military spending (this includes lasers, various secret algorithms that were eventually declassified, etc).
> Were first created in 1961.
Early research into lasers was primarily academic and civilian, but once demonstrated the military poured a lot of money into them during the Cold War which advanced materials sciences that was required for making better & better lasers.
> the rush during the Cold War made it too expensive to continue
It was always too expensive to continue. The only reason the space program was ever funded was for military purposes. It was completely borne out of V2 rocket research the Nazi's started & the US just kept funding the same Nazi scientists to keep working in the US after the war as a counter to the USSR. And even today's space race was made possible due to privately acquired artifacts piggy backing on the corpse of the civilian run / military funded space program. No military investment and I think you more likely end up with NO space program whatsoever.
> Why do you think so?
The Manhattan project had many of the founders of QM on the payroll and QM was completely essential for the atomic bomb to work. Radar development required R&D into QM. QM magnetometers are being funded by the Navy today & there's all sorts of exotic QM applications the military is funding that we're not privy to I'm sure.
> In the end, imagine a world where even a fraction of all the money spent on military was spent on research directly instead.
You're imagining a counterfactual that has no example of it necessarily existing. Indeed, we see a consistent push to cut everything but the military from one US political party while the other side funds the military and tries to fund other things as well. Prior to the 20th century, scientific research was in academia and some private funding of commercial applications. The pace of innovation though is incomparable. So the question is probably closer to "do you want huge amounts of R&D tied to military spending" or "slower rate of progress". Whatever criticisms and failures you level against the US and its military (and there are many), I'm of the opinion that on net it still yielded a positive change to the world order during the 20th century.
On the other hand the US is running a large deficit and has a large debt - >120% of GDP - so that spend is in part other people's money.
With the foreign countries holding the most US debt being Japan, China, UK, Luxembourg and Canada.
I would also point out that you could view US bases in places like Japan or Chagos Islands as 'subsidising' local defence or it could be viewed as simple occupation.
Well we're getting into political territory, but recently that "subsidized" seems to have swiftly changed to "threatened", so, I don't know. What you say used to be true in the past, but it's not so clear anymore.
Also: only country that ever invoked article 5 was actually the US. In that sense the opposite is true ("lots of countries have subsidized US defense"). The US "subsidy" came from the strong conviction that "US would act if we needed it", but that conviction is quickly evaporating.
The United States is certainly providing far more value than they’re receiving back, especially given many partners in NATO aren’t even meeting their relatively paltry obligations to defense spending.
There’s of course some benefit here but it’s largely intangible. It extends the United States’ sphere of influence and diminishes Russia’s.
I’m not saying it’s altruistic because we’re definitely acting in our own self interest and there is perceived benefit to doing these things but the consequence is still that we are spending more money on defense than we need to and other countries get to spend far less than they should be.
Yeah, let's go back to heavily armed European countries at each other's necks every couple decades... The US benefits immensely from having a stable and not terribly militaristic trading bloc.
Like every other scientific discovery, weaponize it. I can imagine a few ways that one can disable advanced weaponry or cause harmful/adverse effects to weaponry, computer systems, and/or ammunition. I imagine that such a solution would cause the desired harm something without leaving a trace.
I don't see "distance" mentioned on the article, but I did see a temperature (118 K = -155 C)(which make it (currently) impossible to use outside a lab). The breakthrough is here though, and now someone must already be at work to see if this can be operated in battlefield/real-life conditions.
I remember on TBBT when they made a gyroscope-thingie-invention but it was 'THIS' big, and the army officer was pressing them to remake it 'that' small so it can be fitted on missiles (or whatever). Isn't this how it typically happens?
> the team worked with FePS3 — a material that transitions to an antiferromagnetic phase at a critical temperature of around 118 kelvins (-247 degrees Fahrenheit).
> [...]
> They placed the sample in a vacuum chamber and cooled it down to temperatures at and below 118 K.
I feel like this massive caveat was buried half way through the article. This is why I dislike university press. I mean, the wizardry is impressive, but it isn't gonna revolutionize anything anytime soon if it requires a vacuum and liquid Krypton-ish temperatures.
>but it isn't gonna revolutionize anything anytime soon
Reminds me of CCD. Back in the day CCD only worked effectively at liquid nitrogen temperatures; a couple of decades of development and you could have one in a pocket camera.
We are on the other hand still waiting for the room temperature super conductor and the fusion reactors. I’d say that most interesting breakthroughs never reach the stage where they are useful.
That’s good. Ideally we won’t have a scattering of profit seeking engineering firms casting magnetic fields everywhere when we have the most cursory scientific understanding of high spin metals in the brain.
I think it’s more appropriate to say conduction and convection doesn’t work well. When you have a suit, it’s meant to block radiation and that’s the mode of heat transfer in space. If space was a fantastic insulator, the suit itself would eventually overheat since you have to remove the heat somehow (they boil off water in vacuum similar to sweat).
Terahertz radiation falls in between infrared radiation and microwave radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum, and it shares some properties with each of these. I find it weird they used this term throughout the article.
Thanks! I'm sick and couldn't bring myself to do the wavelength calculation. Your comment helped my thoughts. I think people working on microwave equipment (frequency counters, ...) work in Hz.That's probably why they used the term.
At least for Discworld, I'd argue the causation was the other way around: The books parodied real things, often injecting a fantastic aspect with the subtext of "All you people in the real world should be a lot more amazed at what's going on here."
For example, "hyphenated silicon" (semiconductor doping) involved in how rock trolls think, and the catch-all explanation of "because quantum."
keep in mind that ALL materials are photo reactive
in one way or another, and that the realistic number of possible materials, is infinite*
All materials are conductive in some way or condition, think : superconductors .
Molecular strength engineering materials are something else waiting in the wings of material sciences.
Main point is that, this is still early days with
the full effects of bench top vs building size equipment used in research, to show.
It is hard to stage an unstaged photo. You would have to hide behind some equipment and wait for them to work, and at the same time, on the same thing. Hopefully when it was going well.
> scientists believe antiferromagnetic materials could be a more robust alternative to existing magnetic-based storage technologies
Scientists working on interesting anti-ferromagnetic materials need a justification for doing so under the crazy grant system we operate, more like.
The downside of antiferromagnetic data storage, or skyrmion storage, or any of the other various ideas recently, is that reading the data is very difficult even if it is present, to the point of making a real world device pretty much practically impossible. I know, I also worked on this sort of thing before leaving academia!
Knowledge in itself is good. We don’t need everything to have a direct commercial application. In fact most discoveries by their nature do not have directly applicable commercial applications.
Here's an excellent lecture that drives this point home:
"Physics in the Interest of Society Lecture 2019: John Parmentola"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx-55BhuFks
I agree and I am sure physicguy also agree but, alas, those who manage the grants system frequently don't.
Because those who pay for the taxes frequently don't. So some justification needs to happen to spend other peoples money. A better way would be nice, though.
This is a popular argument but there are plenty of things that cost orders of magnitude more taxes that go towards projects that lots of people don’t agree with. Americas trillion dollar war machine for example.
Well put. But, of course many on here don't have time for the concerns of simpleton non-elites, and whether they should have a say about where their money goes; I've noticed lately I look for the greyed out comments first on HN.
Divert a percentage of military spending to a pool of money for scientists to use.
Isn’t that what government grants essentially already are?
In the US, maybe. But other countries don't need to launder research money through their defense budgets.
How is it laundering if the research has an explicit use for the military? I'm confused on your point.
It would be nice if the research could be just for the general public good instead of having to have an explicit use for the military to get the money.
You're using a military technology to communicate that thought.
Imagine how much better it would’ve been if not for the military involvement. Imagine how many things developed purely to enhance the efficiency of destroying other humans could have been developed instead to enhance and improve lives instead. So many trillions wasted on imaginary borders and in service of imaginary friends over the last… ever.
And yet time and time again we see science struggle to move forward in meaningful ways unless there is conflict / the military funds it.
How do you explain scientific advancement in less armed nations? Some of the most advanced research in the world happens in states with incredibly small forces.
Perhaps you've confused the economic advantage of a militaristic state with a connection between military science and progress.
For example, the space program basically died when the Cold War ended and it took a long time for it to restart and we still have yet to achieve things in the commercial space that the government could do in the 60s like reach our nearest satellite. Same goes for the cancellation of the SSC which could have achieved what the LHC discovered but 10 years earlier. Saying that other states are making discoveries is ignoring the fact that it takes them longer to achieve those goals than with the military or other emergency situation propelling them forward.
What a load off bull! Most fundamental discoveries have been independent of conflicts.
Certainly all of the rapid progress of the 20th century was because of military funding. The Cold War made it quite clear how when you drastically changed priorities how quickly various programs started getting canceled and our achievements started falling away (eg beating Soviets to space killed any desire of either party to continue, the Cold War ending killed the SSC, etc). You have WW2 to thank for nuclear technology, lasers, rapid advancements in aircraft, modern cryptography and directly leading to the space race. Even QM takes on military funding to take it from niche curiosity to applied research and real world impact. It’s all indelibly linked.
I’m not sure why you’re having such a reaction to a pretty mundane observation that military funding on technology gets further and faster than the civilians can. Heck go look at how far military is in the math behind cryptography consistently comparing discoveries civilians make and when we learn the military had that tech once it’s declassified decades later.
> I’m not sure why you’re having such a reaction to a pretty mundane observation that military funding on technology gets further and faster than the civilians can
Because it is just plain wrong. And it glorifies military spending and war. Just because the military complex has so much money that their spare change dwarfs many other sources of research funding doesn't mean it is money that couldn't have been used much more efficiently if it was spent wisely from the start.
And about the plain wrong part:
> You have WW2 to thank for nuclear technology,
The fundamental research was done before the war by the international scientific community, and in particular people from Germany and Italy. The hard part done during the Manhattan project was to develop the industrial processes to produce enough fissile material to make the bombs, but making the bombs from that was fairly trivial.
> lasers
Were first created in 1961.
> the space race.
It has been argued that the reason we stopped going to the moon and beyond is that the rush during the Cold War made it too expensive to continue. A more paced development would have been sustainable and would have gone much further.
> Even QM takes on military funding to take it from niche curiosity to applied research and real world impact.
Why do you think so?
In the end, imagine a world where even a fraction of all the money spent on military was spent on research directly instead.
> Because it is just plain wrong. And it glorifies military spending and war. Just because the military complex has so much money that their spare change dwarfs many other sources of research funding doesn't mean it is money that couldn't have been used much more efficiently if it was spent wisely from the start.
And yet time and time again, funding follows the military. I don't disagree it's an economics problem. I'm just highlighting that historically large groups of people generally aren't fans of "lets spend money on science" but are more OK with it being laundered through the military under the guise of defense. I'm passing no moral judgement nor glorifying. I'm simply representing how people as groups have behaved historically. It's irrelevant where/when the fundamental research was done. Applied science is a critical component in the flywheel for research as it enables new instruments, equipment, and more understanding of the problems with theoretical research when models and reality disagree. Modern fundamental research in astrophysics today would not be possible without the applied research that was carried on the backs of military spending (this includes lasers, various secret algorithms that were eventually declassified, etc).
> Were first created in 1961.
Early research into lasers was primarily academic and civilian, but once demonstrated the military poured a lot of money into them during the Cold War which advanced materials sciences that was required for making better & better lasers.
> the rush during the Cold War made it too expensive to continue
It was always too expensive to continue. The only reason the space program was ever funded was for military purposes. It was completely borne out of V2 rocket research the Nazi's started & the US just kept funding the same Nazi scientists to keep working in the US after the war as a counter to the USSR. And even today's space race was made possible due to privately acquired artifacts piggy backing on the corpse of the civilian run / military funded space program. No military investment and I think you more likely end up with NO space program whatsoever.
> Why do you think so?
The Manhattan project had many of the founders of QM on the payroll and QM was completely essential for the atomic bomb to work. Radar development required R&D into QM. QM magnetometers are being funded by the Navy today & there's all sorts of exotic QM applications the military is funding that we're not privy to I'm sure.
> In the end, imagine a world where even a fraction of all the money spent on military was spent on research directly instead.
You're imagining a counterfactual that has no example of it necessarily existing. Indeed, we see a consistent push to cut everything but the military from one US political party while the other side funds the military and tries to fund other things as well. Prior to the 20th century, scientific research was in academia and some private funding of commercial applications. The pace of innovation though is incomparable. So the question is probably closer to "do you want huge amounts of R&D tied to military spending" or "slower rate of progress". Whatever criticisms and failures you level against the US and its military (and there are many), I'm of the opinion that on net it still yielded a positive change to the world order during the 20th century.
Many such countries have their defense subsidized by the US.
On the other hand the US is running a large deficit and has a large debt - >120% of GDP - so that spend is in part other people's money.
With the foreign countries holding the most US debt being Japan, China, UK, Luxembourg and Canada.
I would also point out that you could view US bases in places like Japan or Chagos Islands as 'subsidising' local defence or it could be viewed as simple occupation.
Well we're getting into political territory, but recently that "subsidized" seems to have swiftly changed to "threatened", so, I don't know. What you say used to be true in the past, but it's not so clear anymore.
Also: only country that ever invoked article 5 was actually the US. In that sense the opposite is true ("lots of countries have subsidized US defense"). The US "subsidy" came from the strong conviction that "US would act if we needed it", but that conviction is quickly evaporating.
Do you believe the US receives no economic benefit from that defense, or that it is providing said defense at a loss?
The United States is certainly providing far more value than they’re receiving back, especially given many partners in NATO aren’t even meeting their relatively paltry obligations to defense spending.
There’s of course some benefit here but it’s largely intangible. It extends the United States’ sphere of influence and diminishes Russia’s.
I’m not saying it’s altruistic because we’re definitely acting in our own self interest and there is perceived benefit to doing these things but the consequence is still that we are spending more money on defense than we need to and other countries get to spend far less than they should be.
Yeah, let's go back to heavily armed European countries at each other's necks every couple decades... The US benefits immensely from having a stable and not terribly militaristic trading bloc.
What do the taxpayers say?
(Me I say yes! But I learned, I usually do not represent a majority)
You are correct. Please try to convince grant agencies that blue sky research doesn’t need direct application.
Like every other scientific discovery, weaponize it. I can imagine a few ways that one can disable advanced weaponry or cause harmful/adverse effects to weaponry, computer systems, and/or ammunition. I imagine that such a solution would cause the desired harm something without leaving a trace.
I don't see "distance" mentioned on the article, but I did see a temperature (118 K = -155 C)(which make it (currently) impossible to use outside a lab). The breakthrough is here though, and now someone must already be at work to see if this can be operated in battlefield/real-life conditions.
I remember on TBBT when they made a gyroscope-thingie-invention but it was 'THIS' big, and the army officer was pressing them to remake it 'that' small so it can be fitted on missiles (or whatever). Isn't this how it typically happens?
> the team worked with FePS3 — a material that transitions to an antiferromagnetic phase at a critical temperature of around 118 kelvins (-247 degrees Fahrenheit). > [...] > They placed the sample in a vacuum chamber and cooled it down to temperatures at and below 118 K.
I feel like this massive caveat was buried half way through the article. This is why I dislike university press. I mean, the wizardry is impressive, but it isn't gonna revolutionize anything anytime soon if it requires a vacuum and liquid Krypton-ish temperatures.
>but it isn't gonna revolutionize anything anytime soon
Reminds me of CCD. Back in the day CCD only worked effectively at liquid nitrogen temperatures; a couple of decades of development and you could have one in a pocket camera.
Maybe that's what you meant.
We are on the other hand still waiting for the room temperature super conductor and the fusion reactors. I’d say that most interesting breakthroughs never reach the stage where they are useful.
Indeed, that is what I meant. This is a neat result, just not practical yet.
It's not that bad - 118K is slightly above the boiling point of LNG(~112K), so achievable at scale.
That’s good. Ideally we won’t have a scattering of profit seeking engineering firms casting magnetic fields everywhere when we have the most cursory scientific understanding of high spin metals in the brain.
If anything, we might reassess our current usage…
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8189590/
https://web.stanford.edu/group/solomon/research.html
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266652202...
Could be useful in space where those are the default conditions
Space is a fantastic insulator. Space suits for astronauts have to be cooled, not heated.
I think it’s more appropriate to say conduction and convection doesn’t work well. When you have a suit, it’s meant to block radiation and that’s the mode of heat transfer in space. If space was a fantastic insulator, the suit itself would eventually overheat since you have to remove the heat somehow (they boil off water in vacuum similar to sweat).
It’s basic research
So it works at room temperature in low earth orbit.
Because of solar radiation, you have to take special measures with heat shields, etc, to achieve low temperatures in low earth orbit.
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/Numbers/Math/Mathematical_...
Could it have a practical use in space? Which is both already a vacuum and close to absolute zero temperature wise?
A practical application of storing data in space that could just easily be beamed to earth to be stored?
From everything I’m seeing so far, all protocols for space are stateful to deal with the incredibly high latency.
I can see a future where the space between earth and mars is a constellation of massive caching servers.
you could have rotating disks that can encode data as they turn towards the sun.
Or the sun's light could drive the rotation using magnetic force.
Please, we can only get so excited.
Exactly. I can’t believe they published something if we can’t buy it and use it right now.
"Researchers discover new material for optically-controlled magnetic memory" (2024) https://phys.org/news/2024-08-material-optically-magnetic-me... ..
"Distinguishing surface and bulk electromagnetism via their dynamics in an intrinsic magnetic topological insulator" (2024) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adn5696
> MnBi2Te4
ScholarlyArticle: "Terahertz field-induced metastable magnetization near criticality in FePS3" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08226-x
"Room temperature chirality switching and detection in a helimagnetic MnAu2 thin film" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46326-4 .. https://scitechdaily.com/memory-breakthrough-helical-magnets... .. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41921153
Terahertz radiation falls in between infrared radiation and microwave radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum, and it shares some properties with each of these. I find it weird they used this term throughout the article.
Thanks! I'm sick and couldn't bring myself to do the wavelength calculation. Your comment helped my thoughts. I think people working on microwave equipment (frequency counters, ...) work in Hz.That's probably why they used the term.
Current Physics look like a Zorkian/Discworldian tale.
At least for Discworld, I'd argue the causation was the other way around: The books parodied real things, often injecting a fantastic aspect with the subtext of "All you people in the real world should be a lot more amazed at what's going on here."
For example, "hyphenated silicon" (semiconductor doping) involved in how rock trolls think, and the catch-all explanation of "because quantum."
Zork adventures too. They parodied learning system commands/programming with in-game spells.
“ Antiferromagnets could be incorporated into future memory chips that store and process more data while using less energy”
“using a terahertz laser”
#doubt
a material
keep in mind that ALL materials are photo reactive in one way or another, and that the realistic number of possible materials, is infinite* All materials are conductive in some way or condition, think : superconductors . Molecular strength engineering materials are something else waiting in the wings of material sciences. Main point is that, this is still early days with the full effects of bench top vs building size equipment used in research, to show.
* hugely, massive, wow big make you dizzy, number
Can we create matter from light?
Indeed we can:
https://www.energy.gov/science/np/articles/making-matter-col...
Scientists find strong evidence for the long-predicted Breit-Wheeler effect—generating matter and antimatter from collisions of real photons.
Breit–Wheeler process > Experimental observations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breit%E2%80%93Wheeler_process#...
So instead of magneto-optic media, we can now have opto-magnetic media?
Tractor beam!
Given your comment, you may like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_tweezers
Maybe the outlandish future star trek etc promised will come into fruition after all
Gotta love the picture of the three, because it is not staged.
It is hard to stage an unstaged photo. You would have to hide behind some equipment and wait for them to work, and at the same time, on the same thing. Hopefully when it was going well.
Wild life photographers probably have some tips.
Isnt all light terahertz light?
Nope, terahertz range, even 999.9 THz, is way too low a frequency to be visible as light for us.
Only if you define light as radiation your eyes are sensitive to. In scientific articles, it usually means all frequencies.
hm, electromagnetic field is light. it was light all the time.