Washington, Sept 23 : An international team of scientists have demonstrated the dramatic effects of quantum mechanics on a simple magnet.

As part of their study, the team focussed on a square of spins, the tiny bar magnets associated with the electrons in the copper atoms in the organometallic material.

At the nano scale, magnetism arises from atoms behaving like little magnets called ‘spins’.

In ferromagnets – the kind that sticks to fridge doors – all of these atomic magnets point in the same direction.

Elsewhere in antiferromagnets, scientists believed the spins spontaneously align themselves opposite to the adjacent spins, leaving the material magnetically neutral overall.

Now, a new study in the journal ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ (PNAS) has shown that this scenario is incorrect, as it ignores the uncertainties of quantum mechanics.

Quantum-mechanical physical laws, which operate on the nanoscale allow a spin to simultaneously point both up and down.

At the same time, two spins can be linked such that even though it is impossible to know the direction of either by itself, they will always point in opposite directions – in which case they are ‘entangled’.

Scientists from the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN), who led the study, said the importance of the work lay in establishing how a conventional tool of material science – neutron beams produced at particle accelerators and nuclear reactors – ‘could be used to produce images of the ghostly entangled states of the quantum world’.

The researchers believe they have now successfully demonstrated that neutrons can detect entanglement, the key resource for quantum computing.

Lead author, Prof. Des McMorrow from the LCN, said: “When we embarked on this work, I think it is fair to say that none of us were expecting to see such gigantic effects produced by quantum entanglement in the material we were studying. We were following a hunch that this material might yield something important and we had the good sense to pursue it.”

The scientists now want to pursue the implications for high temperature superconductors, materials carrying electrical currents with no heating, and which bear remarkable similarities to the insulating antiferromagnets. (With inputs from ANI)