While magnets can take all kinds of forms, like the ones that hold up papers on refrigerators or the electromagnets that are made of copper and wire, they're usually solids. But for the first time, scientists have created a permanently magnetic liquid.

And they did it by accident.

The discovery, made at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, allows for scientists to manipulate the magnetic matter. Thomas Russell, a distinguished professor of polymer science and engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who was a senior author on the paper, told LiveScience that scientists could "make magnets that are liquid and they could conform to different shapes—and the shapes are really up to you."

It all started when the research team was examining iron oxides, or chemical compounds made up of iron and oxygen. Eventual lead author and grad student Xubo Liu was looking at a 3D-printed object made up of the material and noticed its particles spinning in union. It soon became apparent that the entire object was spinning, too.



So the scientists proceeded to create tiny droplets from water, oil, and iron oxides, according to their description in LiveScience. Then, after they separated the droplets, the researchers placed them near a magnetic coil, which magnetized them.

By itself, that's not remarkable; soft magnets, known as ferromagnets, can exist in liquid form when they're close to magnetic objects. Ferromagnets are common, like paperclips that become magnetized when attracted to a magnet.

But what happened next surprised the scientists: The droplets stayed magnetized.

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They're not entirely sure what happened. "The permanent magnetization could be controlled by coupling and uncoupling the magnetization of individual nanoparticles, making it possible to 'write and erase' shapes of the droplets or to elongate them into cylinders," they write in their study, published in Science.

"For me, it sort of represents a sort of new state of magnetic materials," Russell tells LiveScience. In order to make those materials, the next step is to determine, how, exactly, these particles are able to hold onto their magnetic fields.

Source: LiveScience

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