Case closed on mystery of why a spinning magnet can levitate other magnets

Magnetic levitation is a technology best known in maglev trains, which allow a train to travel without friction by lifting it off its rails using electromagnetic induction. In 2021, however, Hamdi Ucar at Göksal Aeronautics in Turkey left physicists scratching their heads by demonstrating a phenomenon that no known type of magnetic levitation – or seemingly the laws of classical electromagnetism at all – could explain.

When a permanent ‘rotor’ magnet was rotated at around 200Hz perpendicular to its north–south axis, another magnet, nicknamed the ‘floater’, could levitate above it, spinning synchronously with the rotor with its magnetic field oriented perpendicularly to the rotor’s axis of magnetisation. It therefore developed a permanent north or south pole at the top or bottom.