{"id":214337,"date":"2025-05-20T09:16:56","date_gmt":"2025-05-20T14:16:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/invisible-currents-at-the-edge-study-shows-how-magnetic-particles-reveal-hidden-rule-of-nature"},"modified":"2025-05-20T09:16:56","modified_gmt":"2025-05-20T14:16:56","slug":"invisible-currents-at-the-edge-study-shows-how-magnetic-particles-reveal-hidden-rule-of-nature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/invisible-currents-at-the-edge-study-shows-how-magnetic-particles-reveal-hidden-rule-of-nature","title":{"rendered":"Invisible currents at the edge: Study shows how magnetic particles reveal hidden rule of nature"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/invisible-currents-at-the-edge-study-shows-how-magnetic-particles-reveal-hidden-rule-of-nature.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019ve ever watched a flock of birds move in perfect unison or seen ripples travel across a pond, you\u2019ve witnessed nature\u2019s remarkable ability to coordinate motion. Recently, a team of scientists and engineers at Rice University discovered a similar phenomenon on a microscopic scale, where tiny magnetic particles driven by rotating fields spontaneously move along the edges of clusters driven by invisible \u201cedge currents\u201d that follow the rules of an unexpected branch of physics.<\/p>\n<p>The research is published in the journal <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.aps.org\/prresearch\/abstract\/10.1103\/PhysRevResearch.7.023094\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Physical Review Research<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen I saw the initial data\u2014with streams of particles moving faster along the edges than in the middle\u2014I said \u2018these are edge flows\u2019 and we got to work exploring this,\u201d said corresponding author Evelyn Tang, assistant professor of physics and astronomy. \u201cWhat\u2019s very exciting is that we can explain their emergence using ideas from topological physics, a field that became prominent due to quantum computers and <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/exotic+materials\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">exotic materials<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you\u2019ve ever watched a flock of birds move in perfect unison or seen ripples travel across a pond, you\u2019ve witnessed nature\u2019s remarkable ability to coordinate motion. Recently, a team of scientists and engineers at Rice University discovered a similar phenomenon on a microscopic scale, where tiny magnetic particles driven by rotating fields spontaneously move [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-214337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=214337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/214337\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=214337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=214337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=214337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}