A third form of magnetism has been confirmed, upending a century of physics textbooks

Altermagnetism, a third class of collinear magnetism that sits between the two familiar kinds, has been confirmed in experiments and has now earned its discoverers the 2026 Europhysics Prize. The European Physical Society’s Condensed Matter Division named Jairo Sinova of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Libor Šmejkal and Tomas Jungwirth as the winners. Sinova called it a fundamental discovery and noted that an entire magnetic phase stayed hidden for more than one hundred years.

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The news is the prize rather than a fresh measurement, and the confirming work dates mostly to 2024. Calling it the upending of textbooks is the shorthand of the coverage; the physics is an addition to a classification, not a collapse of it.

Ferromagnets, antiferromagnets and the gap between them

Physicists long sorted collinear magnets into two groups. In ferromagnets, the tiny magnetic moments of electrons line up, giving a net magnetization, the property behind refrigerator magnets and much of today’s magnetic memory. In antiferromagnets, neighboring moments point in opposite directions and cancel, leaving no net magnetization.

Altermagnets, as the Mainz team describes them, cancel like antiferromagnets, so they have no net magnetization, yet their electrons can behave as they do in ferromagnets. The Mainz release lists strongly spin-polarized electrical currents and very fast magnetic dynamics among the traits, which is why the class interests researchers building spintronic devices that compute with electron spin rather than charge alone. The same release ties altermagnetism to topological physics, unconventional superconductivity and strongly correlated quantum materials. The application language is a possibility; no product exists.

How the theory became a measurement

The prize recognizes theory first. Šmejkal spent 2016 to 2024 in Mainz as a doctoral researcher and then a postdoc in Sinova’s group, and Jungwirth works at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the University of Nottingham. According to the Mainz press release, dated July 24, 2026, the work grew from earlier theory on unconventional magnetic transport, including the crystal anomalous Hall effect, and in 2022 the researchers published a full symmetry classification that identified hundreds of candidate materials. That paper, published in Physical Review X in 2022, supplied the map experimentalists then followed.

The first direct experimental test came from a different Mainz group. Led by Hans-Joachim Elmers, with Olena Fedchenko as first author, the team used a specially adapted momentum microscope at the DESY synchrotron in Hamburg to study a thin layer of ruthenium dioxide. Circularly polarized X-rays excite electrons out of the material, and the instrument maps their momentum so that spin directions can be inferred. The result, reported in Science Advances in 2024 (volume 10, issue 5), reported the first experimental verification of the effect. Elmers said his team was the first to verify the effect experimentally and that altermagnets combine the advantages of ferromagnets and antiferromagnets, according to ScienceDaily’s February 2024 report.

Other groups have since tested the predictions with angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, which measures the energy and momentum of electrons ejected by light, and with electrical transport measurements. The Mainz release says these confirmed altermagnetic behavior in several materials, but it does not name them, the journals or the facilities, so the number of confirmed materials is not a figure this article can give. The prize release also credits the collaboration between Sinova’s Mainz group and Jungwirth’s team in Prague, a partnership of theorists who combined symmetry mathematics with the physics of electron spin in devices, the field called spintronics. That mix of abstract classification and practical device physics is why candidate materials could be listed by the hundreds before any of them had been measured.

The prize is from July, and the textbook line is shorthand

Dates need care. ScienceDaily’s repost of the Mainz release appeared on Oct. 18, 2026, and its feed item, listed on ScienceDaily’s top science feed, says physicists identified a hidden third form of magnetism that challenges more than 100 years of physics. The original announcement came on July 24, and the prize is to be presented in September 2026 at the 32nd General Conference of the Condensed Matter Division in Graz, Austria. The Europhysics Prize has been awarded since 1975 and is described by the university as one of Europe’s most prestigious honors in condensed matter physics. ScienceDaily’s related coverage from February 2024 adds that researchers first postulated the class in 2019, which gives the sequence as 2019 proposal, 2022 classification, 2024 experiments, 2026 prize.

Two limits belong with the claim. First, the 2024 demonstration was a measurement on a thin layer of one compound, and the sources do not say how many materials have been confirmed in total. Second, a confirmed class is not a finished technology: the sources describe potential for future computing and electronics, not a device. The society’s prize page lists the award among its distinctions for condensed matter physics.

The press release also notes that Science listed the discovery among its breakthroughs of 2024, a recognition that pre-dated the prize by a year and a half. Sinova said the award recognizes a fundamental discovery, and his wider point, that mature fields can still hold fundamental surprises, is the part of the story that rests on a century of accumulated understanding rather than on one instrument or one crystal.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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