Summary

A research team wanted to better understand how the forces between particles inside a material change. They discovered that by confining one-dimensional classical spin chains inside a mirror box cavity with light, they could force these magnetic particles to organize and undergo a phase transition. Their work provides the simplest exactly solvable examples showing that light can create new phase transitions with materials. In 1925, Ernst Ising showed that a single one-dimensional chain of small magnetic particles with nearest-neighbor interactions does not exhibit a magnetic phase transition at finite temperatures.

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