A team of researchers from the US, Europe and Asia has found a way to get spin-split behavior out of a collinear antiferromagnet. Antiferromagnets are attractive for spintronics, but getting large Berry curvature and spin-split bands from them has been hard.

The team studied UOTe, a collinear antiferromagnet that develops a spontaneous chiral superlattice, a repeating pattern of atomic displacements that comes from frozen chiral phonons. Without the superlattice, the pristine antiferromagnet has neither Berry curvature nor spin-split bands. With it, electrons moving through the lattice pick up large Berry curvature, which the researchers detected through the nonlinear Hall effect.

Researchers at Beihang University, Suzhou Inston Technology and Empyrean Technology have developed a spintronic Ising machine capable of solving combinatorial optimization problems relevant to chip design, including global routing and wiring-layer assignment.

Ising machines are physics-inspired computing systems that represent decision variables as "spins," each taking one of two states, and search for the lowest-energy combination to solve optimization problems. While such machines can be built on quantum, optical or electronic platforms, their speed and scalability are typically limited by the physical mechanisms governing spin dynamics. The new system is built instead on magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM), using the voltage-controlled magnetic anisotropy effect across 96,000 CMOS-integrated spin elements to achieve low write currents and spin-update speeds of 0.3 to 1 nanosecond, at an energy cost of under 40 femtojoules per spin.

Researchers at the University of Central Florida (UCF), University of Notre Dame, George Mason University and Hiroshima University have confirmed altermagnetism, a magnetic order combining features of ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism, in Co₁/₄TaSe₂, a cobalt-intercalated layered transition-metal dichalcogenide (TMD). 

Altermagnets sit between the two conventional magnetic orders: like ferromagnets, their electronic bands split by spin, enabling robust spin-polarized transport; like antiferromagnets, their magnetic moments cancel macroscopically, producing no net stray field. That combination makes altermagnets attractive for spintronics, where ferromagnetic stray fields cause device crosstalk and antiferromagnets suffer weak spin-readout signals. Experimentally confirmed altermagnetic band splitting has so far been reported mainly in MnTe and CrSb; this work extends it to a new, layered van der Waals material family.

Researchers at Institute of Science Tokyo, led by Professor Kouji Taniguchi and Assistant Professor Po-Jung Huang with graduate student Ichi Naruse, have devised a way to generate spin-polarized photocurrents from the bulk of a noncentrosymmetric crystal while cleanly separating that signal from surface effects - a long-standing obstacle in using the circular photogalvanic effect (CPGE) for opto-spintronic devices.

CPGE generates a helicity-dependent photocurrent - one whose direction depends on whether the illuminating light is left- or right-circularly polarized - in materials with strong spin–orbit coupling and broken inversion symmetry. Because electron spin and momentum become locked together in such materials, CPGE offers a purely optical way to generate and probe spin-polarized currents without an external magnetic field, making it attractive for opto-spintronic devices and helicity-sensitive photodetectors. The catch: conventional measurements excite only a thin near-surface region of the material, where bulk and surface electronic states coexist and their contributions to the measured photocurrent are difficult to disentangle.

Researchers at the University of Gothenburg, Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB), the University of Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research have, for the first time, directly imaged the magnetization dynamics inside a spin Hall nano-oscillator (SHNO). Using time-resolved scanning transmission X-ray microscopy, the team observed spin-wave behavior that earlier, indirect measurements had missed. The team also found that prolonged X-ray exposure permanently altered the devices' CoFeB/MgO interface.

In an SHNO, a direct current flowing through a heavy-metal layer generates spin-orbit torque in an adjacent ultrathin magnetic layer through the spin Hall effect. At a nanoscale constriction, the torque is strong enough to cancel magnetic damping and sustain steady precession of the magnetization, turning a DC input into a tunable microwave signal. SHNOs are simple to fabricate, CMOS-compatible and can mutually synchronize in large arrays, which makes them candidates for tunable microwave sources and for neuromorphic computing. The dynamics inside a single oscillator, however, play out over nanometers and fractions of a nanosecond. Until now they could only be inferred from indirect techniques.

Researchers at DGIST, Shinshu University and Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City (VNU-HCM) have shown that the compensation temperature of a ferrimagnetic cobalt-gadolinium (CoGd) film can be lowered electrically. Instead of changing the alloy's composition or thickness, the team used spin-orbit torque (SOT) to rearrange the spins inside the film. The size of the shift could be set by the amplitude and duration of the current pulses. The researchers suggest this could enable ferrimagnetic memory devices whose magnetic properties are tailored locally, after fabrication.

In a ferrimagnet such as CoGd, the cobalt and gadolinium sublattices are magnetized in opposite directions. At the compensation temperature, the two cancel out and the net magnetization drops to zero. Near that point, ferrimagnets switch efficiently under SOT and show fast spin dynamics, which makes the compensation temperature a key design parameter for ferrimagnetic spintronics. It is normally fixed by composition or film thickness, or adjusted by processes such as annealing, hydrogen exposure or ion migration. These approaches are either slow or cannot target specific locations within a finished device.

Researchers at TU Dortmund University have shown that separate time crystals formed in the same semiconductor can synchronize their oscillations, locking to a common frequency even when they are up to about 40 micrometers apart. The team identified the diffusion of spin-polarized electrons as the coupling mechanism. It suggests the effect could serve as a basis for networks of coupled spin oscillators in spintronic devices.

A continuous time crystal is a system that oscillates spontaneously and persistently under constant driving, rather than in response to a periodic external signal. In 2024, the same group reported such a time crystal in an electron-nuclear spin system inside an indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) semiconductor, with oscillations that remained stable for hours. The material is a 10 μm-thick InGaAs layer containing 3% indium and doped with silicon. Each electron bound to a silicon donor interacts with roughly a million surrounding nuclear spins and forms a single oscillator. A circularly polarized pump laser aligns the electron spins, which pass their polarization to the nuclei. The resulting nuclear magnetic field then acts back on the electrons, sustaining the oscillation, which a second laser reads out. The experiments were carried out at about 6 K.

The Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics (MPI-MSP), Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Seoul National University (SNU), the IBS Center for Quantum Nanoscience (QNS) at Ewha Womans University, and the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) have launched the Max Planck-Korea-PSI Center for Quantum Emergent Spintronics (KOMQUEST), an International Max Planck Center focused on spin-based quantum materials research. The founding partners signed KOMQUEST's Cooperation Agreement and held its inaugural kick-off meeting at Schloss Ringberg in Bavaria. The center will launch its broader scientific program at Seoul National University from November 16 to 18, 2026.

KOMQUEST is organized around four research pillars: superconducting spintronics, chiral spintronics, topological spintronics, and spintronics for quantum-coherent control, built on the premise that the emergent properties of atomically engineered interfaces represent one of the richest frontiers in condensed matter physics for future spin-based information technologies.

Researchers at Louisiana State University and the University of Stuttgart have proposed a mechanism for routing spin information through altermagnets, a recently identified class of materials whose alternating magnetic moments cancel out any net magnetization while still letting electrons of opposite spin behave differently as they move through the crystal.

Illustration of a circular domain wall in an altermagnet. The orange and blue arrows show alternating magnetic moments gradually changing direction across the shaded ring, creating a texture that can steer electrons differently depending on their spin. Image credit: LSU

The study addresses a practical problem for spintronics, which encodes information in electron spin rather than charge: altermagnets can already treat spin-up and spin-down electrons differently without producing a stray magnetic field, but researchers have lacked a way to control where each spin state actually goes. The team's calculations show that gradual rotations in an altermagnet's internal magnetic order, such as those found at a domain wall separating two differently oriented regions, reshape the effective paths available to electrons depending on their spin - with the magnetic texture acting like a landscape of hills and valleys that bends spin-up and spin-down electrons differently, similar to how a lens bends light.

Cornell University researchers have demonstrated a way to generate strong, localized static magnetic fields using only light, without external magnets or magnetic materials, an approach they say could advance spintronics, magnetic data storage, and photonic and quantum computing.

Illustration of the metasurface designed to control infrared light. Laser pulses can selectively activate regions of the material, allowing researchers to dynamically tune its optical properties. Image credit: Cornell University 
 

The technique relies on what the team calls a "time interface." Just as a light wave partially reflects and partially transmits when it crosses a spatial boundary, such as the surface between air and water, it does something analogous when it encounters a sudden change in the optical properties of the medium it's traveling through over time, rather than in space. A sufficiently abrupt time interface can also excite a static, zero-frequency mode of the system, effectively pulling part of the light's rapidly oscillating magnetic field out of circulation and freezing it into a stationary magnetic field pattern. Unlike more established light-driven magnetization methods such as the inverse Faraday effect, which tend to rely on the specific nonlinear optical properties of the material used, the team's approach works with the geometry of an engineered surface rather than the material itself. "We used an approach known as localized free carrier generation, which has advantages over other methods of nanoscale magnetization," author Shivaksh Rawat said. "One of the important contributions of our work is that our approach is material agnostic. Any non-metallic surface will work."