Magnets often harbor hidden beauty. Take a simple
fridge magnet: Somewhat counterintuitively, it is ‘sticky’ on one
side but not the other. The secret lies in the way the
magnetisation is arranged in a well-defined pattern within the
material. More intricate magnetization textures are at the heart of
many modern technologies, such as hard disk drives. Now, an
international team of scientists at the Paul Scherrer Institute
PSI, ETH Zurich, the University of Cambridge, the Donetsk Institute
for Physics and Engineering and the Institute for Numerical
Mathematics RAS in Moscow report the discovery of unexpected
magnetic structures inside a tiny pillar made of the magnetic
material gadolinium cobalt. As they write in a paper published
today in the journal Nature Physics, the researchers observed
sub-micrometer loop-shaped configurations, which they identified as
magnetic vortex rings. Far beyond their aesthetic appeal, these
textures might point the way to further complex three-dimensional
structures arising in the bulk of magnets, and could one day form
the basis for novel technological applications.
