I can't see how it would change at all unless you're meaning third order effects like the material getting smaller and loosing buoyancy from the surrounding air.
What you may perceive as a weight change is the Earth's magnetic field's interaction with a gigantic compass. You can obviously check if this is true by flipping the piece into different orientations and re-weighing. Likely, it'll be a tiny effect, but the Earth's field can move compass needles to align with it
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I can easily see the material changing size when all the domains line up but not weight. IR might actually have something there with regards to the magnetic interaction with the Earth's field changing slightly.
It's kind of cool, in a way; there were a series of satellites that used magnetic torquing against Earth's magnetic field to control orientation without using conventional thrusters, because they tended to be impulsive and burning fuel would change the CG of the satellite.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
Gravity and magnetic fields are something that we assume because that are always here.
Years ago I worked with someone that built very sensitive accelerometers, you could put it on the floor and zero it and then put it up on a shelf and measure the change in local gravity.
Yes magnetic materials change volume with magnetization, but not mass. Of course they also change magnetization with changes in volume.
One industrial application of magnetostriction was detonation detectors in aircraft engines. A pin magnet (0.125" diam x 1" long) was tightly wound with a coil, this was installed in a blind hole in the cylinder head with one per cylinder. The flight engineer could look at these signals (one at a time on an oscilloscope) and detect detonation, and thereby adjust the fuel or timing as needed.
Most people use the words mass and weight interchangeably, so they may not pick-up on the fact that, in this discussion, they are two different things. We can't know if the OP is aware of the difference. Carry on.
Another possibility is that the magnetic field of the sample is affecting the sensors or electronics of the electronic balance. A strong magnetic field could possibly induce a Hall Effect in a strain sensor, changing the measured resistance and therefore the calculated strain (weight). Again, orientational changes in the sample would produce differing results in the balance.
TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
