Spinning electrons may help explain why magnets have north and south poles.
Cutting a bar magnet in half won't get rid of its poles. It'll just produce two magnets, each with a north pole that will be attracted to the other magnet's south pole, and vice versa.
The most basic answer as to why magnets have poles lies in the behavior of electrons. All matter, including magnets, is made of atoms. In every atom, the nucleus is surrounded by one or more negatively charged electrons. Each of those electrons generates its own tiny magnetic field, which scientists refer to as a"spin." If enough of those small magnetic fields are pointing in the same direction, the material itself becomes magnetic.
In an unmagnetized material, these individual magnetic fields are pointing in different random directions. In that state, they mostly cancel each other out, so the material isn't magnetic overall. But under the right conditions, the tiny subatomic magnetic fields can align to point in the same direction. One might think of this as the difference between a crowd of people milling about, versus all organizing and facing in the same direction.
Often, that more powerful magnetic field is created by electricity. Electricity and magnetism are fundamentally linked, because magnetic fields are generated by the movement of electrical charges. That's why a spinning electron has a magnetic field. But scientists can also harness electricity to create very powerful magnets, said Paolo Ferracin , a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
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