The family of magnetic materials has been traditionally divided into the ferromagnetic branch known for several millennia and the antiferromagnetic branch known for nearly a century. Researchers from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, together with international collaborators, have recently made a discovery of a new branch of the magnetic family, termed altermagnetic. Now they publish an article in Nature which gives not only a comprehensive theoretical and experimental description of altermagnetism, but also shows how the discovery of altermagnetism inspires future research into an even broader landscape of unconventional magnets beyond the traditional ferromagnets and antiferromagnets.
The well known and broadly exploited ferromagnets offer a range of physical phenomena used, among others, for making memory bits on advanced-node integrated circuits. This so-called spintronic technology is the first in the history of IT to complement semiconductor bits on processor chips. However, using ferromagnets also imposes principal limitations on the spatial, temporal and energy scalability of the spintronic technology.
In 2022, the team from the Institute of Physics published a theoretical identification of the altermagnetic material class, which features a unique combination of an alternating direction of north and south poles on neighboring magnetic atoms with an alternating orientation of an anisotropic local crystal environment of these atoms. Such a magnetic phase can remove the scalability limitations of ferromagnets in future spintronic IT.
Apart from spintronics, altermagnetism caught attention in many fields of condensed matter physics: The initial theoretical work was cited over a thousand times in 2025 alone, with the field gaining particular momentum after the experimental confirmations, also coordinated by the Czech team and published in two back-to-back Nature articles in 2024.
The latest Nature article, published by the team this month, discusses the fundamentals of altermagnetism, as revealed by the theoretical and experimental works carried out over the three years of research in this emerging field. Simultaneusly, the article shows that altermagnetism is not the end but rather a beginning of a scientific journey into new forms of magnetism whose material realizations have been unknown or even considerted non-existing.
Jungwirth, T., Sinova, J., Fernandes, R. M., Liu, Q., Watanabe, H., Murakami, S., Nakatsuji, S., Šmejkal, L. (from FZU: T. Jungwirth, L. Šmejkal): Symmetry, microscopy and spectroscopy signatures of altermagnetism, Nature (2025), doi: 10.1038/s41586-025-09883-2
