https://phys.org/news/2019-03-compass-west.html

The atoms act like tiny compass needles and unfold their effect over tiny distances in the nanometre range, meaning a few millionths of a millimeter. That is why researchers also call them nanomagnets.

The phenomenon that researchers at PSI have now been able to observe is based on an interaction that the two physicists Igor Dzyaloshinskii and Toru Mariya predicted more than 60 years ago. "That was our starting point", says Zhaochu Luo, physicist at PSI and ETH Zurich.