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takyon writes:

Work by scientists at the Oak Ridge and Los Alamos National Laboratories has led to an explanation of the "missing" magnetism of plutonium. Plutonium had been predicted to be magnetic by conventional theories, which successfully predicted the element's structural properties, but its magnetism had never been observed experimentally. Until now:

Finally, after seven decades, this scientific mystery on plutonium's "missing" magnetism has been resolved. Using neutron scattering, researchers from the Department of Energy's Los Alamos and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national laboratories have made the first direct measurements of a unique characteristic of plutonium's fluctuating magnetism. In a recent paper in the journal Science Advances, Marc Janoschek from Los Alamos, the paper's lead scientist, explains that plutonium is not devoid of magnetism, but in fact its magnetism is just in a constant state of flux, making it nearly impossible to detect.

"Plutonium sort of exists between two extremes in its electronic configuration—in what we call a quantum mechanical superposition," Janoschek said. "Think of the one extreme where the electrons are completely localized around the plutonium ion, which leads to a magnetic moment. But then the electrons go to the other extreme where they become delocalized and are no longer associated with the same ion anymore."