Physicists Jairo Sinova, Libor Šmejkal, and Tomas Jungwirth earned the 2026 Europhysics Prize for identifying a third form of magnetism. For over a century, scientists categorized collinear magnets into two types, ferromagnets and antiferromagnets. This new discovery of altermagnetism breaks that long-held binary.
The research teams at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences used symmetry theory to identify this magnetic phase. While antiferromagnets possess no net magnetization, altermagnets exhibit electronic properties previously thought to exist only in ferromagnets.
This specific combination allows for highly spin-polarized electrical currents and rapid magnetic dynamics. These features position altermagnets as candidates for future spintronics technologies. By manipulating electron spin instead of electrical charge, these materials could change how we approach information storage.
The implications of this work go beyond potential hardware applications. Altermagnetism defines a new symmetry class of matter, creating links to topological physics and unconventional superconductivity. After the team published their symmetry-based classification in 2022, experimental scientists used spectroscopy and transport measurements to confirm the existence of these materials.
The researchers will receive their award this September at the 32nd General Conference of the European Physical Society Condensed Matter Division in Graz, Austria. This recognition highlights how even mature scientific fields contain fundamental surprises that wait for the right framework to reveal them.