Engineers Create Magnetic Materials That Mimic Graphene

What Happened Researchers have achieved a breakthrough by creating magnetic materials that exhibit the same unusual physics as graphene, the single-layer carbon material that won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. The team engineered thin magnetic films with a hexagonal pattern of holes that mimics graphene’s honeycomb atomic structure. The key discovery is that magnetic “spin waves”—ripples of magnetic energy that propagate through materials—in these patterned films follow identical mathematical rules to the electrons in graphene.