New effect of electromagnetism discovered?

[Hawksteinman]

https://phys.org/news/2017-10-effect-electromagnetism-years.html

This was in my FB feed, was wondering how big this is

 

[vanhees71]

Why should this be "a new effect"? It's all well understood within good old Maxwell's theory. So it's not new. Maybe the work done with this kind of trap is new, but not the basic principles. It would rather be a mindblowing discovery if something electromagnetical would be discovered that contradicts Maxwell's theory, which in its quantum version is among the most accurate ever discovered physical theories of mankind!

 

[Redbelly98]

I think it's more accurate to say a new application has been discovered, but not any new physics.

Pretty cool that this was the basis of an experimental exercise in the most recent International Physics Olympiad. :-)

 

[jerromyjon]

Why should this be "a new effect"? It's all well understood within good old Maxwell's theory.

It only took 150 years to realize this new application. The plausibility of the effect might have been well understood but it's applicability has finally been realized. Is this similar to a "magnetic bottle" in 3 dimensions as this is 1 dimension?

 

[vanhees71]

Sure, I don't want to diminish the realization of this new kind of trap, but it's wrong to claim that it's a "new effect". The original paper by the authors is marvelous to read (also download the supplement):

http://aip.scitation.org/doi/abs/10.1063/1.4978876

You can understand the theory treated in this paper after a good course on classical electrodynamics (perhaps after reading a bit about the method of conformal mappings for 2D static em. fields).