Benchtop cosmology exploits solid-state systems

The kind of dynamos thought to be behind the huge magnetic fields found in stars and galaxies, may also exist in Weyl semimetals, materials more common to a solid-state laboratory. Why does this matter? As Belle Dumé points out, the presence of dynamos capable of generating and sustaining a magnetic field in readily available metal systems could provide a handy lab-sized model for what researchers Victor Galitski, Mehdi Kargarian, and Sergey Syzranov describe as the “beautiful astrophysical phenomenon, first proposed by Larmor in 1919.”