A question on atoms

Specifically holmium atoms.

In this Gizmodo article on single atom data storage I read the following.

I don’t understand this. If the goal is to prevent the magnetic field falling apart owing to the influence of other electrons or vibrations how does embedding the holmium atoms in a metal help? Aren’t metals themselves bunches of electrons and vibrations?

Beyond my understanding, but the original article in nature is linked from the gizmondo piece: Stabilizing the magnetic moment of single holmium atoms by symmetry

Core explanation from the summary:

Thanks, guys, but I’m minded of Byron’s verse on Coleridge

Maybe this is just something that can’t be put in layman’s terms but I’m still lost. :slight_smile:

Imagine a bunch of colored pushpins lying in a bowl. You want to study how each push pin behaves as a magnet. So you take the pushpins and put them on a cork board.

The atoms are like the pushpins and the magnesium oxide is the cork board. Magnesium oxide is an insulator/ceramic and does not conduct - so one atom cannot influence the other one once embedded.

Basically, for the atom to function as a miniature magnet you want to keep it aligned in a given direction. But because the atom has the same energy no matter which way it’s turned, it’s way too easy to bump it out of alignment.

However, if you place the atom on a substrate, the electrostatic interactions between the original atom and the atoms in the substrate can mean it now has a different amount of energy depending on which way it’s turned. That makes it harder to bump it out of alignment, because you’d have to provide at least enough energy to make up the difference between its orientation before the bump and its orientation afterwards.

That part isn’t new. The problem though is this doesn’t give as much stability as you would hope, due to an effect of the electrons from the substrate atoms mixing with the electrons of the original atom. The new work is that these researches found that by imbedding the atom in a lattice of rare earth atoms with a certain crystal structure, they could produce states whose differing symmetry prevented them from mixing together, and thus further stabilize the “magnet” atom.

Thank you, am77494, that I can follow!

Or to boil it down a bit more from my previous response:

In quantum mechanics, certain transitions between states are allowed, and other transitions are forbidden, for reasons related to symmetry. These researchers have created a setup where some of the transitions that would destabilize the atom are forbidden, making it more stable.

In particular, they say that in certain states a single electron from the substrate knocking the atom from one low-energy state to another is forbidden, and instead you’d need to have something like one electron knocking the atom hard enough to send it into a higher energy state, followed by another knocking it down into the new low-energy state. That’s going to happen less often, so the atom stays in its state longer.