The Department of Physics is delighted to welcome Professor Tomas Jungwirth (University of Nottingham & Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Science) as a Colloquium Speaker for the academic year 2025/26. Please join us to listen to Professor Jungwirth's seminar.

A reception will be held directly after the seminar in 8 West 3.15, where tea and coffee will be provided.

The seminar is open to anyone from the university, students are encouraged to attend.

Title

Altermagnetism: Unconventional spin-ordered phase of matter

Abstract

The research beyond conventional magnetism, which led to the recent discovery of altermagnetism [1-5], was largely motivated by the field of spintronics. From an applied perspective, spintronics is a modern branch of integrated-circuit technologies currently undergoing a transition from niche to mass production, in particular thanks to embedded non-volatile memories complementing semiconductors on advance-node processor chips. The functionality of present spintronic memories is based on the magnetization in conventional ferromagnets which generates well separated and conserved spin-up and spin-down channels in the electronic structure. Simultaneously, however, the magnetization sets physical limits on the spatial, temporal and energy scalability of the spintronic technology. In the talk we will show that altermagnetism opens a prospect of removing these limits by combining well separated and conserved spin-up and spin-down channels with no net magnetization. Altermagnetism enables this extraordinary combination of properties thanks to the unconventional nature of the magnetic ordering whose symmetry is reminiscent of unconventional superfluidity.

References

[1] L. Smejkal, J. Sinova, T. Jungwirth, Phys. Rev. X 12, 031042 (2022).
[2] L. Smejkal, J. Sinova, T. Jungwirth, Phys. Rev. X (Perspective) 12, 040501 (2022).
[3] J. Krempasky, T. Jungwirth et al., Nature 626, 517 (2024).
[4] O. J. Amin, T. Jungwirth et al., Nature 636, 348 (2024).
[5] A. Cho, Science 386, 1211 (2024).