Most of us are familiar with the four classical states of matter – solid, liquid, gas and plasma – but there’s a whole world of exotic states out there. Now, physicists at Radboud and Uppsala Universities have identified a new one named “self-induced spin glass,” which could be used to build new artificial intelligence platforms.

Magnetism usually arises when the electrons in the atoms of a material all spin in the same direction. But in a spin glass, the atomic magnets have no order, all spinning in random directions. The “glass” part of the name comes from the similarities to how atoms are arranged amorphously in a piece of regular old glass.

So far spin glasses have only been found in certain alloys, but now, researchers have discovered that the state occurs naturally in the pure element neodymium. To differentiate it from the alloy version, they’ve called the new state self-induced spin glass.