Revealing the nature of magnetic interactions in manganese oxide

For nearly 60 years, scientists have been trying to determine how manganese oxide (MnO) achieves its long-range magnetic order of alternating up and down electron spins. Now, a team of scientists has used their recently developed mathematical approach to study the short-range magnetic interactions that they believe drive this long-range order. By comparing measurements of the local magnetic interactions in MnO with those predicted by competing theoretical models, they determined that the antipar