Many MindedX-ray evidence points to altermagnetism in manganese telluride
A team led by the US Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory reports experimental evidence for altermagnetism, described as a third type of magnetism. The results appear in the journal Science. Daniel Jost, an associate scientist at SLAC and the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, is the lead author.
The material was manganese telluride (MnTe), previously classed as an antiferromagnet. Using specialized X-rays, the researchers found direct evidence of chirality, or handedness, in its magnetic structure. They present this as a key signature of altermagnetism.
For almost 90 years, physicists sorted magnetic materials into ferromagnets, where spins align and give a net field, and antiferromagnets, where neighboring spins alternate and cancel. Antiferromagnetism was identified in 1933. The term altermagnets arrived in 2022, for materials with alternating spins and no net magnetization that still support spin currents. In them, the crystal environments around oppositely aligned spins are rotated relative to each other, which breaks a symmetry found in conventional antiferromagnets.
This matters for abundance because the applications named include advanced memory, quantum devices and more energy-efficient data centers. If they materialize, computing and storage could need less energy, which would widen access to knowledge and connection. That is a long way off.
The caveats are large. This is basic science with no hardware demonstrated, and the applications are only potential. The confirmation is the authors' own belief, based on one material. Our source text was truncated before the X-ray method and results, so those details sit with the original reporting.
Source: ScienceDaily