Physics just confirmed a third kind of magnetism — one that hides in plain sight

For decades, textbooks recognised two kinds of magnetism in materials: ferromagnetism, the fridge-door kind, and antiferromagnetism, its cancelling-out opposite. A team led by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has now delivered conclusive experimental proof of a third: altermagnetism, in a material called manganese telluride. Using X-rays, they directly detected the tell-tale asymmetric, spiral-like arrangement of atomic spins that defines it. The confirmation, published in Science, matters beyond the textbook: altermagnets could underpin faster memory, quantum technologies and more efficient data centres.

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