We’re all used to two types of magnet. The common one, the fridge magnet, is ferromagnetic — its atomic magnets all point the same way (up or down), adding their magnetic effects. The less well known one, the antiferromagnet (AF), has neighbouring atomic magnets that point opposite ways and exactly cancel out magnetically.
For a long time, there’s been an intense drive in computer memory research to create materials in between these two extremes. For this purpose, it helps to have a clear picture of what these extremes mean.
Today, I’ll share what we found. A team of AI agents and I designed one candidate magnet and found another, first made in 1999, that our calculations predict has the properties we were after.
