An international group of physicists have traced the origin of an electromagnetic interaction to the Dirac Equation, which is a fundamental equation of quantum physics.
“The new finding, published as a rapid communication in the journal Physical Review B, advances the fundamental understanding of magnetic systems as well as multiferroics, which can change their electrical polarization when in a magnetic field or magnetic properties when in an electric field. The rapid communications section of Physical Review B, a journal of the American Physical Society, is devoted to the accelerated publication of especially important new results,” according to Phys.org.
“Through this interaction, magnetic moments can generate an electric polarization and an electric polarization can generate a magnetic texture in multiferroics. This provides another handle on how material properties can be tuned or controlled for practical applications in devices based on electrical and magnetic properties,” Laurent Bellaiche, Distinguished Professor of physics at the University of Arkansas, said.
In 2013, researchers from the University of Arkansas first proposed that the momentum of electromagnetic fields can directly couple to the spin of an electron, thus producing physical energy. “This direct coupling explains known, subtle phenomena in magnetoelectric materials and predicts effects that have not yet been experimentally observed.”
“For a long time, scientists explained these effects by using only the so-called spin-orbit coupling. Our paper shows that the angular magnetoelectric interaction also contributes to these effects and that this term, along with spin-orbit coupling, follows naturally from a more exact theory of electron-light. It just had been ignored for so long,” Surendra Singh, professor of physics, added.
