While we attended the MMM conference, we withdrew our paper associated with the conference as we felt that our work and understanding wasn’t complete enough, but also that we couldn’t explain the work within the page limitations. Instead, we decided to take additional time, and submit the final paper to the IEEE Transactions on Magnetics about a year later. The process of writing the paper was not easy – after each long day of working on it and feeling it was well done, rereading it the next day would be humbling. Every single word, sentence, and paragraph was reviewed, reconsidered, and refined again and again and again. As part of the process of writing the paper, our understanding was also constantly challenged as were any assumptions that were made. Ultimately, the process led to a better paper as well as a significantly better understanding of the phenomenon we were observing.
At this point of the research, the biggest assumptions that needed to be challenged were those that we based our understanding. For example, could our observations not have been magnetoelastic in nature but simply have been explained by force being created by current being acted upon by an external field such as that from the Earth’s magnetic field? Was the effect dependent upon the material being magnetostrictive and having a sufficient crystal anisotropy? Our list of questions seemed endless, but we continued to challenge by testing materials and devising experiments. Examples of the materials we tested included:
(i) copper such that we could conduct currents in the Earth’s field that were not magnetostrictive
(ii) materials with both positive and negative magnetostriction (steel versus Nickel)
(iii) magnetic materials that did not have sufficient anisotropy to allow the magnetization to be ‘pulled’ by current.
All our testing continued to support our hypotheses and understanding, which we did our best to elegantly describe within the published IEEE paper.