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Realizing Near-Optical Magnetism

Posted by timothy on from the sticky-eyeballs dept.

Bill Kendrick writes "Researchers have created terahertz magnets from non-magnetic materials. "Researchers were able to create magnetic activity at nearly optical frequencies using common non-magnetic materials such as copper." UCLA also has a press release."

2 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. Magnetism has a frequency? by Andy_R · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Can someone give a me layman's explanation of what (if anything) frequency means in the context of magnetism?

    --
    A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
  2. I have a real beef to pick with this article by chiyosdad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I get the impression that the person who wrote the article is trying to impress the reader with big words, instead of trying to get ideas across in a way that most people can understand. Listen to this:

    Materials that exhibit a magnetic response at terahertz (THz) and optical frequencies are rarely found in nature..

    Response to what? I don't know if he's shining electromagnetic radiation at those frequencies on the material and somehow gets a magnetic field out of it, or what. (Maybe he's just shaking it that fast?) Or how about this:

    The split ring resonators that make up the periodic array were fabricated using a unique self-aligned microfabrication technique called photo-proliferate-process.

    What the hell does it tell me to know what the name of the process is? He could just as well have called it "masturbating bear algorithm" and the amount of information that provides to me would have been the same. It would be much more fruitful to, say, include a short description of how they accomplish that.

    I thought the ucla website would be more informative, but they just have the exact same article.