Fractal patterns can be found everywhere from snowflakes to flash of lightning to the irregular edges of the coasts. Beautiful to behold, their repetitive nature can also inspire mathematical insights into the chaos of the physical landscape.
A new example of these mathematical oddities has been discovered in a type of magnetic substance known as spin ice, and it could help us better understand how a peculiar behavior called a magnetic monopole arises from its unstable structure.
Spin ices are magnetic structural crystals that obey rules similar to those of water ice, with unique interactions governed by the spins of their electrons rather than the tug of war of charges. As a result of this activity, they do not have any low-energy minimal activity states. Instead, they almost hum with noise, even at incredibly low temperatures.
A strange phenomenon arises from this quantum hum: features that act like magnets with only one pole. Although not entirely hypothetical magnetic monopole particles some physicists think they might exist in nature, they behave in a similar enough way to be 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 rules are broken and monopoles appear, with the north and south poles moving apart and acting independently.
many years ago A team of researchers identified characteristic magnetic monopole activity in the quantum hum of a dysprosium titanate spin ice, but the results left some questions about the exact nature of these monopole motions.
In this follow-up study, the physicists realized that the monopoles did not move with complete freedom in three dimensions. Instead, they were restricted to a 2.53-dimensional plane within a fixed lattice.
The scientists created complex models at the atomic scale to show that the movement of the monopole was constrained in a fractal pattern that was erased and rewritten based on previous conditions and motions.
“When we introduced this into our models, the fractals popped up immediately.” says physicist Jonathan Hallen from Cambridge University.
“The spin configurations were creating a network in which the monopoles had to move. The network was branching out like a fractal with exactly the right dimension.”
This dynamic behavior explains why conventional experiments had previously missed fractals. It was the noise 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,” says physicist Claudio Castelnovo from the University of Cambridge in the UK. “The results of 30 years of experiments did not add up.”
“After several failed attempts to explain the noise results, we finally had a eureka moment, realizing that monopoles must live in a fractal world and not move freely in three dimensions, as had always been assumed.”
These types of advances can lead to drastic changes in the possibilities of science and in how materials like spin ice can be used: perhaps in spintronicsan emerging field of study that could offer a next generation upgrade in the electronics we use today.
“In addition to explaining several puzzling experimental results that have been challenging us for a long time, the discovery of a mechanism for the emergence of a new type of fractal has led to a completely unexpected route for unconventional motion in three dimensions to take place.” . says theoretical physicist Roderich Moessner from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Germany.
The research has been published in Sciences.
