Topic

Spintronics

20 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: September 18, 2026.

Physics
Maryland Physicists Stacked a Two-Dimensional Magnet on a Two-Dimensional Ferroelectric and Got a Room-Temperature Multiferroic That Switches Its Magnetism With a Small Voltage, 3,000 Times Without Wearing Out

Neither long-range magnetic order nor ferroelectric order survives easily in a sheet a few atoms thick, and getting both to coexist at 19°C was thought to be extraordinarily hard. Cheng Gong's team did it by building each order in its own layer and pressing the layers together.

Sep 18 4 min read
Physics
Heat Can Switch Off a Topological Insulator. Above 500 Kelvin, Bismuth Selenide Stops Being One

Physicists in Shanghai calculated that spin-orbit coupling — long treated as a fixed property of a material's atoms — weakens as temperature rises, closing the band inversion that makes topological states possible.

Sep 7 3 min read
Physics
The Spin Seebeck Effect Only Worked at a Thin-Film Surface

A NIMS and University of Tokyo team coated yttrium iron garnet powder with platinum and pressed it into bulk, scattering nanoscale interfaces throughout the material. Thickness no longer caps the output.

Sep 4 3 min read
Physics
Cornell Physicists Stopped Part of a Light Wave and Left a Magnet Behind for 300 Femtoseconds

No external magnets, no magnetic materials — just a germanium metasurface and a well-timed laser pulse that changes the rules while the light is still inside.

Sep 2 3 min read
Physics
Two Time Crystals 40 Micrometers Apart Locked Into the Same Beat — Over a Thousand Times Farther Than They Should Reach

Physicists at TU Dortmund built self-oscillating spin systems inside a semiconductor chip and found that distant ones synchronize, holding the rhythm for hours.

Aug 11 3 min read
Physics
Magnetic Vortices Normally Veer 30 Degrees Off Course. Mainz Filmed a Kind That Goes Straight

Time-resolved X-ray microscopy at BESSY II caught antiferromagnetic skyrmions tracking an applied current exactly — and rebounding off each other when they collided.

Aug 10 3 min read
Physics
Flip a Voltage and the Atoms Spin the Other Way: NC State Reversed a Crystal's Handedness on Command

Researchers switched the chirality of phonons inside a ferroelectric crystal with an electric field, then watched the electron spins flip along with them — an electrical control knob for spin that spintronics has been missing.

Aug 8 3 min read
Physics
Physicists Stretch a Magnetic Ripple's Life 100-Fold, Clearing a Path to Coin-Sized Quantum Computers

By cooling ultra-pure crystals to a whisker above absolute zero, a Vienna-led team kept magnons alive for 18 microseconds — long enough, they say, to carry quantum information the way today's best qubits do.

Jul 9 2 min read
Physics
Physicists Stretch a Magnetic 'Ripple' 100-Fold, Clearing a Path to Penny-Sized Quantum Computers

University of Vienna researchers kept magnons alive for 18 microseconds — long enough to carry quantum information — by chilling ultrapure crystals to a whisker above absolute zero.

Jul 7 3 min read
Physics
Physicists Extend a Magnetic Wave's Life 100-Fold, Clearing a Path to Penny-Sized Quantum Computers

Researchers led by the University of Vienna kept 'magnons' alive for 18 microseconds — long enough to carry quantum information — and found the only real limit is how pure the crystal is.

Jul 4 3 min read
Physics
Scientists Find a Hidden Quantum World Inside Ordinary Cobalt That Survives at Room Temperature

Spin-resolved measurements at Germany's BESSY II revealed a dense network of topologically protected electronic states in plain cobalt metal, opening a possible route to faster, magnetically controlled spintronic devices.

Jun 6 3 min read
Physics
Researchers Discover Exotic Floquet States in Magnetic Vortices Using Minimal Energy

Dresden team finds gentle magnetic wave stimulation can trigger previously unseen oscillation patterns in tiny magnetic structures, challenging fundamental physics assumptions.

Mar 31 3 min read
Physics
Scientists Discover Bizarre Oscillation States in Magnetic Vortices Using Minimal Energy

Researchers found that gentle magnetic wave stimulation can generate exotic Floquet states in tiny magnetic structures, challenging existing physics assumptions.

Mar 28 4 min read
Physics
Scientists Discover Bizarre New States Inside Tiny Magnetic Whirlpools

Researchers trigger exotic Floquet oscillations using minimal energy in magnetic vortices, challenging existing physics assumptions and potentially linking different quantum technologies.

Mar 27 4 min read
Physics
Scientists Film Electron Spin Flipping in 140 Trillionths of a Second — A Potential Revolution in Computer Memory

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have filmed in unprecedented slow-motion detail the moment electron spins flip inside an antiferromagnet, revealing two switching mechanisms that could power next-generation ultra-fast, low-energy memory chips.

Mar 23 4 min read
Physics
Decades of Spintronics Theory Were Wrong, Chinese Scientists Find — And It Could Unlock Better Chips

A team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences has shown that the standard explanation for a key magnetic phenomenon used to design memory and sensor devices for twenty years was fundamentally incorrect.

Mar 22 4 min read
Physics
Norwegian Scientists Discover World's First Triplet Superconductor — A 'Holy Grail' of Quantum Physics

A niobium-rhenium alloy identified at NTNU can carry both electrical and spin current with zero resistance, a breakthrough theorists have been predicting for fifteen years and that could reshape quantum computing hardware.

Mar 22 4 min read
Physics
Scientists Use a Single Laser Pulse to Flip an Entire Ferromagnet's Polarity — Without Any Heat

Physicists at ETH Zurich and the University of Basel published in Nature the first demonstration of all-optical, room-temperature control of a ferromagnet's magnetic orientation, using twisted layers of molybdenum ditelluride and a focused laser beam to switch collective electron spin states permanently.

Mar 22 5 min read
Physics
University of Tokyo Scientists Film Electron Spins Flipping Inside an Antiferromagnet in 140 Trillionths of a Second — Revealing Two Hidden Mechanisms

Professor Ryo Shimano's team used ultrafast laser pulses to capture frame-by-frame footage of magnetic switching in manganese-tin — a material that had been almost entirely invisible to physicists — and discovered a heat-free switching pathway that could enable magnetic memory and logic ten times faster than today's best MRAM chips.

Mar 21 5 min read
Physics
Scientists Film a Magnetic Flip in 140 Trillionths of a Second — And Find Two Ways It Happens

Ryo Shimano's team at the University of Tokyo used ultrafast laser pulses to capture the fastest magnetic movie ever recorded inside manganese-tin, revealing a non-thermal spin-switching mechanism that is far more energy efficient than previously known and could enable terahertz-speed spintronic computers.

Mar 20 5 min read