The article's title is misleading: they actually mean a new kind of <i>permanent magnet</i> (that was theoretically predicted but hadn't been observed until now), <i>not</i> a new kind of <i>magnetism</i> (as in, something not predicted or accounted for by our existing theory of electromagnetism).
Spintronics, which these magnets might be useful for, have several potential advantages for low power, speed and quantum coherence for quantum computing.<p>So a very nice discovery. Love how we keep finding strange new useful modes of matter at “the bottom”.<p>Computing substrates are far from reaching any kind of final form or limit.
Here's a nice non-paywalled article on this:<p><a href="https://phys.org/news/2024-02-altermagnetism-experimentally.html" rel="nofollow">https://phys.org/news/2024-02-altermagnetism-experimentally....</a>
I thought we had long since established that magnetism is illusory, an artifact of special relativity.<p>But it seems like a thin film of this stuff would be a good thing to skim an electron beam over, if you wanted some extremely short-waved photons.