Heat Destroys All Order. Except for in This One Special Case.
An editorially independent publication supported by the Simons Foundation.
Sunlight melts snowflakes. Fire turns logs into soot and smoke. A hot oven will make a magnet lose its pull. Physicists know from countless examples that if you crank the temperature high enough, structures and patterns break down.
Now, though, they’ve cooked up a striking exception. In a string of results over the past few years, researchers have shown that an idealized substance resembling two intermingled magnets can — in theory — maintain an orderly pattern no matter how hot it gets. The discovery might influence cosmology or affect the quest to bring quantum phenomena to room temperature.
“It just hits you in the face because it’s not what you expect,” said Fabian Rennecke, a researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Giessen, Germany, who was not involved in the work.
“I am quite intrigued and am thinking how to find a concrete realization of this framework,” said Jörg Schmalian, a physicist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
