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Supercomputers Help Researchers Find Two New Kinds Of Magnets (phys.org)
"Predicting magnets is a heck of a job, and their discovery is very rare," said a mechanical engineering professor at Duke University. But after years of work synthesizing various predictions, material scientists "predicted and built two new magnetic materials, atom-by-atom, using high-throughput computational models." An anonymous reader quotes Phys.org:
The success marks a new era for the large-scale design of new magnetic materials at unprecedented speed. Although magnets abound in everyday life, they are actually rarities -- only about 5% of known inorganic compounds show even a hint of magnetism. And of those, just a few dozen are useful in real-world applications because of variability in properties such as effective temperature range and magnetic permanence...
In a new study, materials scientists from Duke University provide a shortcut in this process. They show the capability to predict magnetism in new materials through computer models that can screen hundreds of thousands of candidates in short order. And, to prove it works, they've created two magnetic materials that have never been seen before.
"The first alloy is particularly interesting," reports the International Business Times, "because it contains no rare-earth materials, which are both expensive and difficult to acquire." But a Duke mechanical engineering professor points out that "It doesn't really matter if either of these new magnets proves useful in the future. The ability to rapidly predict their existence is a major coup and will be invaluable to materials scientists moving forward."
In a new study, materials scientists from Duke University provide a shortcut in this process. They show the capability to predict magnetism in new materials through computer models that can screen hundreds of thousands of candidates in short order. And, to prove it works, they've created two magnetic materials that have never been seen before.
"The first alloy is particularly interesting," reports the International Business Times, "because it contains no rare-earth materials, which are both expensive and difficult to acquire." But a Duke mechanical engineering professor points out that "It doesn't really matter if either of these new magnets proves useful in the future. The ability to rapidly predict their existence is a major coup and will be invaluable to materials scientists moving forward."
"It doesn't really matter if either of these new magnets proves useful in the future. The ability to rapidly predict their existence is a major coup and will be invaluable to scientists making drinking wagers moving forward."
fixed that
TFA seems to leave out a lot of important geeky details. Like which supercomputer was used? How many hours of CPU (or maybe GPU?) time was used? Since they were running hundreds of models in parallel, why did they need a supercomputer at all? Wouldn't it have been more cost effective to rent compute servers in the cloud?
... rare-earth materials, which are both expensive and difficult to acquire."
or
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26687605 (amongst others) that claim Rare-Earths are not rare and by extension not necessarily expensive or even very difficult to acquire.
Which is it then? Who should we believe?
Was the point of this to find new magnets by using computers, or by using newly created material to verify computer algorithms?
That's like your QA team making better products to test the inferior product meant to be sold.
Duke University's Gender Studies Department used the supercomputer to discover two new genders previously unknown to gender scientists. And in a complementary study, their English Department is planning to research possible new pronouns. Go Blue Devil Supercomputer!
on that no rare earth materials page. One I understand. But three?! Cacaphony of GTFO no matter how good of a read the article may have been.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
The scientific explanation: God makes one end of magnets attractive to other end, just like he made women attractive to men. Anything else is an abomination.
I just don't get something about permanent magnets.
A magnet exerts force, no?
Exerting force requires energy, no?
Where is the energy in a magnet? How is it obtained, stored, replenished?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Women are attractive to men. I totally get that. I mean, just look at them - they're fucking hot.
The real question is, men are really gross, so why are women attracted to men at all? Shouldn't they all be lesbians?
They aren't. That's why you have to grab them by the pussy.
One of the magnetic (actually anti-ferromagnetic) compounds discovered was Mn2PtPd. Pt and Pd are two orders of magnitude more rare than the "relatively common" rare earths...
A friend just posted a pic in with him wearing a Member's Only jacket. I asked if he was the last member. He beat my grandmother to death and my mother is now in the ICU after he kept hitting her in the face until she stopped breathing.
Typical deceptive title. /. is really going to the dogs.
...until you find magnetic materials suitable to mass produce tokamaks.
Men are caring and protective.
> why are women attracted to men at all?
Stop listening to the misandry, men are fucking awesome. We have body hair, facial hair and muscles and we don't give a fuck. We tell stories and do awesome things our whole fucking lives. Stop the self hate.
More titel, pop-sci exaggeration. We dont know enough about the formation of these lattices to truly just calculate these new compounds. It MAYBE helps a chemist intuition but its only as good as the science that goes into the calculation - and right now we simply cant predict even the simplest systems. That dosnt stop people trying though.
Stop the self hate
Thanks for interrupting your self love to post that
The success marks a new era for the large-scale design of new magnetic materials
No, it doesn't. This is screening, and regardless of how much those in the field of drug "design" and materials "design" use those words, it's not Design, and it's not Engineering. It's Discovery, and it's great that physics and computation have gotten to the point where we can actually discover useful things in silico much faster than at the bench. But engineering requires an understanding of the underlying relationship between materials composition and desired quantitative property, and that is largely still lacking. If it weren't, you'd be screening 10s of compounds, not ~10^5.
Discovery and prediction are fine, no one will complain about the gold you get from panning for it. But don't dress it up in misleading language--true materials engineering and design are still a long way off.
Rare earth metals are not scarce material. They are metals that occur together in nature and take a lot of effort to separate.
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Upvoted for being just the right combination of snark, logic, exasperation and on-point critique.
You, SouthernDandy, do not win the internets today, but you struck a palpable hit!