A third form of magnetism: altermagnetism pioneers win Europhysics Prize
For over 100 years physics knew two kinds of magnetism. Three physicists from Germany, the Czech Republic and the UK are honoured for discovering a third.
Archive image · Photo: Schiplagerheide / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
The European Physical Society's 2026 Europhysics Prize goes to Jairo Sinova of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Libor Šmejkal of two Max Planck Institutes and the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and Tomas Jungwirth of the same institute and the University of Nottingham. They are honoured for discovering altermagnetism – a third class of collinear magnetism alongside ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism.
In altermagnets the magnetic moments cancel out, so, as in antiferromagnets, there is no net magnetisation. Their electrons can, however, show properties previously associated with ferromagnets, such as strongly spin-polarised currents. That could make altermagnets valuable for a new generation of spintronic devices and speed up future information technologies.
A 2022 symmetry classification identified hundreds of candidate materials, and hundreds of papers followed within a few years. Sinova calls it "a fundamental discovery that challenged one of the most established paradigms". The prize has been awarded since 1975.