See this forum topic:
Ultra Cold Gas Mimics Ultra Hot Plasma
There we have previous, nearly identical, experiments with the same results and no mention of "ferromagnetism".
This new paper is just wishful thinking, imo:
"The evidence is pretty strong," said David E. Pritchard, an MIT physics professor and one of the study's authors. "But it is not yet a slam dunk. We were not able to study how the atoms would all point in the same direction. They started to form molecules and may not have had enough time to align themselves."
I did not notice them mentioning that an associated magnetic field was actually measured.
I forget where, but in another article, they mentioned that this state couldn't exist in nature anyways.
"Frozen-in" magnetic fields are impossible.
In a nutshell, here's why:
Superconducting materials also interact in interesting ways with magnetic fields. While in the superconducting state, a superconducting material will tend to exclude all magnetic fields, a phenomenon known as the Meissner effect. However, if the magnetic field strength intensifies beyond a critical level, the superconducting material will be rendered non-superconductive. In other words, superconducting materials will lose their superconductivity (no matter how cold you make them) if exposed to too strong of a magnetic field. In fact, the presence of any magnetic field tends to lower the critical temperature of any superconducting material: the more magnetic field present, the colder you have to make the material before it will superconduct.
Basically, the hypothetical frozen in magnetic field destroys it's own ideal condition.
Even when a plasma is forced into a superconductive state by laser electron cooling, which is near 0 k and essentially what takes place in these experiments (a superconductive superfluid), it would exclude all magnetic fields, to a point, and would require temps <0 K to remain superconductive in the presence of an applied external magnetic field exceeding the exclusion threshold.
I think what's happening, even though I haven't read the whole paper, is that the Earth's magnetic field is not being shielded, so when the superconductive superfluid state is reached, the plasma
excludes the Earth's magnetic field and expands against it, the rapid acceleration of the particles moving apart causes the magnetic void to expand beyond static equilibrium so it rebounds and shrinks again. In this state the plasma is very "elastic". When the laser "trap" is turned off ("turning off" the superconductive state), the Earth's magnetic field causes the void to collapse, the velocity of the particles coming closer in the void brings them too close and they rapidly accelerate (rebound) away from each other.
Perhaps, instead of creating ferromagnetism, they have actually created a magnetic void.
