09/25/2026
The Magnet That Isn't a Magnet, and Why It Could Change Electronics
A material with no net magnetic field that can still send spin-up and spin-down electrons down completely different paths. That is what LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy faculty Constantin Schrade and Mathias Scheurer of the University of Stuttgart show is possible in altermagnets, a newly recognized class of magnetic materials, in a new study in Science Advances.
Altermagnets have no net magnetization. Their internal magnetic moments alternate and cancel out. But because of how atoms are arranged in the crystal, electrons with opposite spins still behave differently as they move through the material. That makes altermagnets promising for spintronics, where an electron's spin, not just its charge, carries information.
Schrade and Scheurer show that gradual twists in an altermagnet's magnetic pattern, called altermagnetic textures, can steer spin-up and spin-down electrons along different paths. Schrade explains it simply: give two balls the same push, put a hill in front of one and a valley in front of the other, and they end up on different routes. Shape the texture, and you shape where each spin goes.
Near a domain wall, the effect can even act like a lens, bending, focusing or defocusing electron trajectories depending on spin. The theory also predicts a distinctive multi lobed spin pattern that could serve as a fingerprint for identifying altermagnetic order in the lab, using tools such as scanning SQUID or nitrogen vacancy magnetometry.
It is early, fundamental research, but it gives experimentalists something concrete to test, and points toward a future where magnetic texture, not net magnetization, routes information through a chip.
Great to see this kind of foundational physics coming out of our LSU College of Science.
For full story see https://lnkd.in/eHMgmHux
