Three physicists who identified an entirely new category of magnetism have won the European Physical Society's 2026 Europhysics Prize, one of condensed-matter physics' most prestigious honors. The award recognizes work by Jairo Sinova of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), Libor Šmejkal, now affiliated with the Max Planck Institutes in Dresden and Halle and the Czech Academy of Sciences, and Tomas Jungwirth of the Czech Academy of Sciences and the University of Nottingham.
For more than a century, physics recognized two basic families of collinear magnetism: ferromagnetism, in which atomic magnetic moments align and reinforce one another to produce a net magnetic field, as in a refrigerator magnet, and antiferromagnetism, in which neighboring moments point in opposite directions and cancel out entirely. The team's work, built up over roughly a decade and formalized in a 2022 symmetry classification detailed in the university's announcement, identified a third option: altermagnetism.
No Net Field, but Ferromagnet-Like Behavior
In an altermagnet, atomic magnetic moments cancel out just as they do in an antiferromagnet, leaving no net magnetization that a compass could detect. But because of the particular rotational symmetry of the crystal structure, electrons moving through the material still develop the kind of strongly spin-polarized currents and fast magnetic dynamics normally associated only with ferromagnets. That combination — invisible magnetism paired with ferromagnet-grade electronic behavior — had gone unnoticed in materials physics for more than 100 years.
"Discovering that an entirely new magnetic phase had remained hidden for more than one hundred years" was itself remarkable, Sinova said of the finding, housed at Mainz's Spin Phenomena Interdisciplinary Center. He called the prize recognition of "a fundamental discovery that challenged one of the most established paradigms" in condensed-matter physics.
The 2022 classification did not stop at theory: it flagged hundreds of real candidate materials that symmetry rules predicted should be altermagnetic. In the years since, experimental groups using techniques such as angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and electrical transport measurements have confirmed altermagnetic behavior in several of them, and the broader field has expanded rapidly, drawing in researchers working on topological physics and unconventional superconductivity as well as spintronics.
Altermagnets interest engineers because materials with no net magnetization resist the kind of unwanted magnetic interference that complicates dense data storage, while their spin-polarized currents offer a route toward faster, more efficient spin-based electronic devices. The Europhysics Prize, established in 1975 by the European Physical Society's Condensed Matter Division, was presented at the division's general conference in Graz, Austria, in September.
The discovery was separately named a scientific breakthrough of 2024 by the journal Science. Researchers in the field say the next test is practical: whether altermagnetic materials can be integrated into working spintronic devices, and whether the unconventional superconductivity some theorists have linked to altermagnetism can be observed directly.