Disclaimer: An imagining.
If we are going to engineer an interplanetary engine, or even a really efficient jet, humanity is going to need superconductors. If not super conductors then really light strong magnets.
The current work, in my simplistic readings, is to find the correct alloy. Bake a structure with bonds that gives the correct framework for the electron magic.
My idea is to take the atomic magnetic and design the theoretic perfect placement in space of these units. It would be nice to have a non interfering atom just fit nicely in the spaces but I don't think we are at that level of manipulation. If there is such a thing. So the distances should be a multiple of theoretical distance. Guessing at nature and recursion there is probably an adjustment factor between the multiple of the perfect distance factor.
Make some Buckyballs, or some other filler at the needed size. Mill the magnetic material to the correct multiple size and mix. Maybe layer. Possibly, with a lot of wishing and trial and error, fate allows and the magnets align with each other around the packer material giving a strong but light magnet.
Another way of looking at this imagining is have a block of many bar magnets gapped by little rubber blocks at the correct distance to generate the same electron movement. A less dense magnet for the same magnetic strength for the same volume because of it's designed structure.
Hopefully not total bollocks but the just a right wrong step.
.-- wjt, Oct 27 2018 //Hopefully not total bollocks// Hope is a wonderful thing, [wjt].-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 27 2018 I wonder if AI has been used yet to find better magnetic materials. Along with the elements it is made of, the optimal shape of the magnetic domains (cubes? Hexagons? rectangles of a certain length), as well as the size (number of atoms) in the domain.
In magnets clumps of a few hundred atoms all have identical spins, called domains. Then there is a mosaic of these clumps.
Using AI to find the most optimal tesselation of the optimal quantities-of-atoms-per-domain amount could improve things.
I am under the impression thta you can use lasers to orient spins. Perhaps a laser aimed at a magnet-blank gradually being formed from chemical vapor deposition could create optimally spaced, highly homogenous domains.
Perhaps it could improve the efficiency of motors.-- beanangel, Oct 28 2018 [beanangel] Like minds, after the same advancement but you are far more well read. [Maxwell] Hope still needs energy which means it can be detrimental.
I my mind magnetism is an the dynamic interplay between photons, electrons and the quantum foam. Designing control of this energetic volume will be mankind's stepping stone to the exoplanets.-- wjt, Nov 03 2018 hmmmmm.... (+) shapes are good.
Once when I was drifting off to sleep sometime in my twenties I started picturing magnets in the shape of pyramids, and playing around in my head with how they would interact with one another. Didn't really go anywhere. Then I saw what would happen to them if they were fractured from their centers outwards towards their points and reconfigured so that they made magnetic cells which have only one outward facet of one polarity being held apart by the tiniest of gaps from the outwards facets of the other polarity creating a mono-pole if they were wrapped into a geodesic sphere.
That led to several days of waking right on the cusp of sleep with possibilities to the point where I wasn't sure if it was going to end and let me go back to sleep again.
Play around with the possibilities of an actual working mono-pole in your own head without preconceptions and you'll see what I mean.
Good times. Good times.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Nov 03 2018 [2 fries] You didn't happen to dream of the energy/matter play that derived an isolated pole? Mankind would love that kind of heads up. People are already expert at using stuff in new ways.-- wjt, Nov 03 2018 [2f] Have you heard of a halback array, it makes a strong pole on one side, and minimal magnetism on the other side; so is there a 2D (planar) halback array, and really interestingly, a 3D stacked halbach array, perhaps a little like your pyramids, but optimally some other shape that ///\\\ overlaps or "focuses" the magnetic pole to higher power. Computer modelling of magnets with physics software and genetic algorithms could design this even if it seems a big thing to humans.
Pole pieces designed by a genetic algorithm for the interior of a magnet could be your "bulking agent" that makes magnets more powerful.
[wjt]: pole pieces in the magnet: pole pieces shape magnetic fields, causing local intensification at the pole piece; your optimized magnetic domains could be interspersed with pole piece material (at improved manufacturing) to, just perhaps, cause greater magnetic strength from interdomain communication.
Also, as to super strong magnets consider an image of a bulk magnet slice that looks like a tessellation of hexagons. Using better manufacturing (like IC lithography) replace some of the hexagons with an individually addressable electromagnet, then there is a landscape where with induced electricity some of the magnetic domain hexagon spaces can be 100s or 1000s of times more magnetic when inductive power activates their microelectromagnet; this causes new effects at the magnet, and makes a new kind of MRI (NMR) magnet for scanning. That is a little like making your passive "bulking agents" able to switch between no magnetism and much more than material magnetism amount.-- beanangel, May 07 2021 random, halfbakery