Scientists who discovered a third form of magnetism won a major physics prize

Jairo Sinova, Libor Šmejkal and Tomáš Jungwirth have won the 2026 Europhysics Prize for discovering altermagnetism, a third fundamental class of magnetism that sits alongside ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism. The European Physical Society’s Condensed Matter Division gives the prize, which was established in 1975.

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The recognition came with an unusual claim: for more than a century, collinear magnets were sorted into two families, and the trio’s work showed that a third had been hiding in plain sight. ScienceDaily carried the story in mid-October, but the prize itself was announced months earlier, in late July.

Three laureates and where they work

The Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz press release, dated July 24, names the laureates. Sinova is a professor at Mainz and director of its Spin Phenomena Interdisciplinary Center. Šmejkal worked at Mainz from 2016 to 2024, first as a doctoral researcher and then as a postdoctoral scientist, and led the development of many of the theoretical concepts behind the discovery, according to the Mainz release. He is now affiliated with the Max Planck Institutes in Dresden and the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Jungwirth holds posts at that Czech institute and at the University of Nottingham.

The prize was due to be presented on Sept. 22 at the 32nd General Conference of the society’s Condensed Matter Division in Graz, Austria. The Institute of Physics in Prague noted that it is the first time a Czech physicist or Czech research institution has won the award. The Prague release is dated July 28, four days after the Mainz announcement, so the prize was public by late July even though aggregator coverage appeared in October.

Altermagnets between ferromagnets and antiferromagnets

The physics is easiest to grasp by comparison. In a ferromagnet, the tiny magnetic moments of atoms line up and add to a net magnetization, the property that makes a fridge magnet stick. In an antiferromagnet, neighboring moments point in opposite directions and cancel, so no net magnetization appears. Altermagnets cancel like antiferromagnets, yet their electrons behave in ways long associated with ferromagnets, including strongly spin-polarized currents and fast magnetic dynamics, according to the ScienceDaily account of the prize.

The key steps, as the Mainz release lays them out, include a prediction of the crystal anomalous Hall effect and a complete symmetry classification published in 2022 that identified hundreds of candidate materials. Experimental groups worldwide have since confirmed the effect with techniques such as angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and electrical transport measurements.

At Mainz, Sinova said the award recognizes a fundamental discovery. He said the discovery challenged one of the most established paradigms in condensed matter physics, and that finding an entirely new magnetic phase that had stayed hidden for more than one hundred years showed “even the most mature scientific fields can still hold fundamental surprises.”

The classification matters because it explains what had been missed. For over 100 years, collinear magnets were filed as either ferromagnets or antiferromagnets, and the symmetry analysis showed that a class of crystals sits outside both boxes. The 2022 classification gave experimentalists a map of hundreds of candidate materials, and the later confirmations with photoemission and transport measurements moved altermagnetism from a theoretical possibility to a measured property of real crystals.

Why electronics makers are watching

The practical interest lies in spintronics, which uses the spin of electrons rather than only their charge to store and move information. Because altermagnets have no net magnetization, neighboring components would avoid the magnetic interference that limits how tightly ferromagnetic parts can be packed. The Prague institute’s account adds that altermagnets can operate at terahertz frequencies, which could enable faster and more energy-efficient memory and artificial-intelligence hardware. Those are prospects, not products; the work so far is fundamental physics, and no device built on the effect is described in the announcements.

Jungwirth said the original works from 2019 to 2024 have received thousands of citations, according to the Prague institute. Its director, Michael Prouza, observed that fourteen laureates of the prize have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics, which is context rather than a prediction about these three. The Mainz announcement was also distributed through AlphaGalileo and the German science news service idw with the same description of the discovery.

What the prize does and does not establish is worth stating plainly. It honors a discovery that began as theory and has since been checked in experiments by groups around the world, which is a stronger footing than most prizes for predictions. It does not certify any device. The announcements speak in terms of what altermagnets could enable in memory and computing, and the Mainz release frames the achievement as proof that even long-mature fields can still hold surprises, which is a statement about physics rather than about products.

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

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