Findivoza

November 7, 2026

Findivoza

Science & Health

Scientists confirm a third kind of magnetism — and it could change how computers store data

Faizan Altaf

For almost a century, physics textbooks told a simple story about magnetism: there were two kinds, and that was that. A magnet either pulled things towards it, like a fridge magnet, or its magnetism cancelled itself out inside the material. Now physicists say they have found the missing piece of evidence for a third kind — one that behaves like both of the old kinds at once.

The result, published in Science on Thursday, 29 October 2026, comes from a team led by the United States Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Studying a material called manganese telluride, the researchers say they have delivered conclusive experimental proof of a magnetic phase called altermagnetism: a subtle twist in the way the material’s magnetism is arranged, which the theory says should not exist in an ordinary antiferromagnet.

That twist matters because of what it could one day make possible. Altermagnets combine two qualities engineers have long wanted in the same material: they are stable and invisible to stray magnetic fields, like antiferromagnets, yet they can carry the spin-polarised electric currents that make information easy to read, like ferromagnets. If that combination can be turned into working devices, it could lead to computer memory and data-centre hardware that is faster, tougher and less power-hungry. That is still a long way off — no chip has been built from this result — but for a field arguing about whether this third kind of magnetism is real, the new experiment is a genuine landmark.

At a glance

What happened: A SLAC-led team reported direct experimental evidence of chirality — a handed, twist-like structure — in the magnetism of manganese telluride, and published the result in Science on 29 October 2026. The team says this is conclusive proof of altermagnetism, a third magnetic phase.

Why it matters: Altermagnets have no overall magnetic field, so they are hard to disturb, but they can still generate spin-polarised currents, so information stored in them should be easy to read. That combination could help build faster, more energy-efficient memory and computing hardware.

What happens next: Researchers will try to control altermagnetic states with light and electricity, test other candidate materials, and work out whether the effect can be switched, read and manufactured reliably enough for real devices.

What the team actually found

The paper, titled “Chiral altermagnon in MnTe”, is led by Daniel Jost, an associate scientist at SLAC and at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences. The heart of the finding is chirality, or handedness: a chiral object cannot be laid exactly on top of its mirror image, just as a left hand cannot fit into a right-handed glove.

Jost’s team went looking for that handedness in manganese telluride, a material physicists had treated as an ordinary antiferromagnet for decades until, a few years ago, it began to look like a possible altermagnet. They took samples to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France, to a beamline known as ID32, which produces highly controlled beams of polarised X-rays. Chiral materials scatter left-handed polarised X-rays differently from right-handed ones; materials without chirality scatter both the same way. By shining circularly polarised X-rays at manganese telluride and comparing its response to left- and right-handed light, the team picked out a clear chiral signal that, the researchers say, should not exist in a conventional antiferromagnet.

“This chiral signature gave us the solid experimental ground to say altermagnetism stands in a class of its own,” Jost said. The first experiment was completed in 2024, and the team repeated it in early 2025, getting the same result again.

Stanford, which published the announcement alongside SLAC, put the claim plainly: the team had delivered conclusive experimental proof of a third magnetic phase. Phys.org, reporting the same result on 30 October, used the same framing, while another round-up that day called it unusually strong evidence. One experiment rarely ends an argument by itself, but this one was designed to answer the specific objection holding the field back, and the researchers say it does.

Magnetism in plain English

Magnetism, to a physicist, is a quantum property of a material. It comes down to the electrons inside it, and to a property of electrons called spin — a kind of internal angular momentum that can be pictured, very roughly, as each electron pointing either “up” or “down”. A material counts as magnetic when those spins line up in an organised pattern, rather than pointing in random directions.

In a ferromagnet, all the spins point in the same direction — up, up, up, or down, down, down. Because they all pull together, the material produces a magnetic field you can measure from the outside. That is the magnetism of fridge magnets, compass needles and electric motors, known and used since ancient times. In an antiferromagnet, discovered in 1933, the spins alternate — up, down, up, down — so each spin cancels out its neighbour and the material produces no net magnetic field. For nearly 90 years, every magnetic material was supposed to be one or the other.

That picture began to crack when researchers found materials that did not fit either box: they had the alternating spin pattern of an antiferromagnet, with no overall magnetic field, yet they could carry spin-polarised currents, in which the electrons moving through the material mostly share the same spin direction. Those two behaviours were once thought to be mutually exclusive. The explanation that emerged was a third category.

The twist that makes an altermagnet different

An altermagnet looks, at first glance, like an antiferromagnet: its spins alternate up, down, up, down, and it has no net magnetisation. The difference is in the crystal around those spins. In an altermagnet, the crystal lattice surrounding the “up” spins is rotated relative to the lattice surrounding the “down” spins. That rotation is a break in symmetry: the two sets of spins sit in geometrically different surroundings, even though the spins themselves still cancel out. Electrons moving through the material feel that difference, so it can split electrons by spin and carry spin-polarised currents, just as a ferromagnet does, while showing no magnetic field to the outside world.

The idea grew out of theoretical work that began in 2019, when researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany and the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, including Libor Šmejkal, Jairo Sinova and Tomas Jungwirth, started to identify materials the old two-category system could not explain. In 2022, Šmejkal and his colleagues gave the predicted phase its name: altermagnetism, from magnetism that alternates, but in an alternative symmetry mode.

That history is why the new result needs describing carefully. It is not the first evidence for altermagnetism. In 2024, an international team published a study in Nature showing altermagnetism directly in the same material, manganese telluride, imaging its magnetic domains with photoemission electron microscopy. Researchers have identified more than 200 candidate altermagnetic materials, and in July 2026 the European Physical Society awarded its Europhysics Prize to Sinova, Šmejkal and Jungwirth for the discovery. What was still missing was the specific evidence the SLAC team has now supplied. By 2024, Jost said, there were already strong reasons to believe altermagnetism was real, “but there was still a missing piece to the puzzle”: chirality. Because an altermagnet’s lattice is twisted, its magnetic structure should have a handedness that a conventional antiferromagnet lacks. Nobody had shown that handedness directly. Now, the team says, they have.

How the experiment worked

X-rays are light with a very short wavelength, and they can be polarised — made to spin in a particular direction as they travel. Circularly polarised X-rays come in left-handed and right-handed versions, like screws turning in opposite directions. A chiral material scatters the two kinds differently; a non-chiral material treats them the same, so the difference is a fingerprint of handedness. That is what the team measured at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, on its ID32 beamline, built for exactly this kind of work. The difference was clear, and it pointed in the direction the altermagnetism theory predicts.

The first experiment was done in 2024, and the team repeated it in early 2025, with the chiral signal still there. That repeat run is part of the evidence, not an afterthought. It is also a reminder of how slow careful physics can be: the announcement in October 2026 rests on measurements made a year or more earlier, worked over, checked and written up for peer review in Science.

Why computers might care

The reason this result travelled beyond physics journals is spintronics. Ordinary electronics uses only one property of the electron: its electric charge. Spintronics adds a second: the electron’s spin. Controlling spin as well as charge gives an extra way to store and process information, in principle with less wasted energy.

That matters because modern computing has an energy problem: data centres use enormous amounts of electricity, much of it turning into heat, and memory chips packed ever more tightly together struggle with heat and interference.

Ferromagnets and antiferromagnets each solve only half of that problem. Ferromagnets are easy to read, because their spin-polarised currents give a clear signal, but they are easy to disturb: Jost noted that a permanent magnet in your pocket could flip the bits of a ferromagnetic spintronic device as you walked past. Antiferromagnets fix the stability problem, but they are practically invisible — you cannot easily read the data stored in them or use them to drive efficient spin currents.

“Altermagnets combine the best of both,” Jost said. “They have zero net magnetization, so they’re stable, but they still have the capability to generate spin-polarized currents needed to easily extract information. That gives you an additional degree of freedom to work with.”

That is why the researchers talk about quantum technologies, memory devices and data centres in the same breath. A memory bit built from an altermagnet could, in theory, sit quietly next to its neighbours without disturbing them, survive stray magnetic fields, and still give a strong, readable signal when asked. Spintronic devices built this way have the potential to be faster, more robust and significantly less power-hungry than today’s hardware. The same stability could also help quantum technologies, which are famously sensitive to disturbance.

Nobody has built an altermagnetic memory chip, and this paper does not claim to have done so. Researchers still need reliable ways to switch an altermagnetic state, read it quickly and consistently, and manufacture devices at scale, and the energy advantages have not yet been shown in a real circuit. Manganese telluride may or may not end up in a device; it is the material in which the physics has now been shown most clearly. Next, the team will explore controlling altermagnetic states with light and electricity.

What it does not mean — yet

A discovery like this invites exaggeration. Altermagnetism is now much better supported physics, but it is not a product. It will not make your phone faster next year, and it will not, by itself, solve the energy use of data centres. The gap between proving a magnetic phase exists and shipping a device based on it is measured in years of engineering, and many promising materials never cross it.

The result is also, in one sense, narrow: a proof about one material, manganese telluride, using one technique, X-ray scattering, at one facility. The claim that altermagnetism is a general third class of magnetism rests on the whole body of work around it — the theory, the earlier imaging, the growing list of candidates — not on this paper alone. More than 200 candidates have been proposed, but a candidate is not a confirmed altermagnet. This result supplies the evidence the theory said should be there and nobody had yet found: a handedness in the magnetism itself. It lets a field stop arguing about whether something exists and start arguing about what to do with it.

Frequently asked questions

What is altermagnetism, in simple terms?

Altermagnetism is a proposed third kind of magnetism. Like an antiferromagnet, an altermagnet has alternating electron spins and no overall magnetic field. Unlike an antiferromagnet, the crystal around its spins is twisted, and that twist lets it carry spin-polarised currents like a ferromagnet.

What did the SLAC team actually discover?

The team did not invent altermagnetism — the idea was proposed in 2022 and earlier evidence appeared in 2024. It supplied a missing piece of proof: direct evidence of chirality, or handedness, in the magnetism of manganese telluride, measured with polarised X-rays in France in 2024 and again in early 2025, and published in Science on 29 October 2026.

Why does handedness prove anything?

A conventional antiferromagnet should have no handedness in its magnetic structure; an altermagnet should, because the crystal lattice around its “up” spins is rotated relative to the lattice around its “down” spins. A clear chiral signal is therefore evidence that the material is an altermagnet, not an ordinary antiferromagnet.

Will this make computers faster or use less energy?

Possibly, one day, but not soon. Altermagnets could help build memory and computing devices that are faster, more stable and less power-hungry. Researchers still need to learn how to switch, read and manufacture altermagnetic devices reliably, and those energy savings have not yet been shown in a real circuit. This is a physics result, not a product announcement.

What is spintronics?

Spintronics is electronics that uses the spin of electrons, as well as their electric charge, to store and process information. Ordinary electronics uses charge alone. Using spin as well could give engineers an extra control knob, and devices built this way could be faster, tougher and more energy-efficient.

Conclusion

Physics does not often rewrite a chapter that has stood for almost a century. Magnetism had two kinds for so long that the division felt like a fact of nature. The idea of a third kind, proposed only a few years ago, has turned out to be a whole class of materials hiding in plain sight, including one physicists had called an antiferromagnet for decades.

The SLAC result does not finish that story. It answers one question — is the handedness really there? — and opens several more: which materials are truly altermagnetic, how their states can be switched and read, and whether any can be turned into devices genuinely better than what we have. Those questions will take years to answer. But researchers are no longer asking whether a third kind of magnetism exists. They are asking what it can do.

This article is for general information and education only. It is not legal or financial advice.

Sources

Faizan Altaf

Faizan Altaf is the founder and author of findivoza.com, a news blog covering world, Pakistan, business, technology, health and sport in plain English. He writes for general readers who want clear, trustworthy news without jargon. His work focuses on explaining what happened, why it matters, and what to watch next.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *