Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bhubaneswar, led by Dr. Manish Kumar Mohanta of the Department of Physics, working with collaborators at Virginia Commonwealth University in the US, have theoretically predicted that a monolayer of iron trichloride (FeCl₃), just three atoms thick, can host i-wave altermagnetism, one of the rarer symmetry classes within the recently identified altermagnetic phase.

Altermagnetism has drawn growing interest in condensed matter physics because it combines features of both ferromagnets and antiferromagnets. Like antiferromagnets, altermagnetic materials produce essentially no stray magnetic fields, which means electronic components built from them can be packed closer together without magnetic interference. At the same time, they can generate and control spin-polarized electric currents, the property that makes them relevant to spintronics, where information is encoded in electron spin as well as charge.

Using first-principles calculations, the team found that the FeCl₃ monolayer supports the i-wave symmetry class of altermagnetism, a more complex and less commonly predicted variant than the d-wave altermagnets that have dominated the field so far. According to the researchers, the predicted material also displays significant spin Hall and anomalous Hall effects, both of which are relevant to efficient spin transport and information processing in electronic circuits. It's worth noting that this is a computational prediction based on density-functional theory, rather than an experimental observation of the effect in a physical sample.

"With the growing demand for high-speed and energy-efficient computing, this discovery offers a new direction for designing future electronic devices with improved speed, efficiency and reliability," said Dr. Mohanta.

The researchers point to potential applications spanning high-density memory, spin-based transistors, terahertz communication and quantum information technologies, alongside longer-term relevance to AI hardware and wearable electronics. More broadly, the work adds FeCl₃ to the still-small family of confirmed and predicted altermagnetic materials, and offers another candidate platform for researchers working to translate altermagnetism's combination of antiferromagnet-like compactness and ferromagnet-like spin control into practical spintronic devices.

Researchers led by Xuefeng Guo of Peking University and Chuancheng Jia of Nankai University, together with Mingliang Li of the University of Hong Kong and Beijing Institute of Technology, have published a comprehensive review outlining how individual molecules can be used to encode, manipulate and detect electron spin, laying out a roadmap toward ultra-compact, low-power spintronic and molecular-scale quantum information devices.

Image from: Nano Research

The review surveys the molecular building blocks that make single-molecule spintronics possible - single-molecule magnets, spin-crossover complexes, organic radicals and chiral molecules - each offering a different route to control spin at the single-molecule level, from the large magnetic anisotropy and slow relaxation of single-molecule magnets to the switchable spin selectivity chiral molecules generate without any magnetic field via the chiral-induced spin selectivity effect. Measurement techniques such as spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy and electron spin resonance, combined with gated molecular junctions, have let researchers observe and manipulate spin transport, coherence and many-body effects such as the Kondo effect directly at the single-molecule scale.

Researchers at the Institute of Chemistry and the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, led by Dr. Joanna Dehnel and Dr. Igal Levine, have introduced a contactless technique for probing how chiral 2D perovskites respond differently to circularly polarized light, without first building the material into a complete electronic device.

Chiral perovskites exist in two mirror-image forms, much like a left and right hand, and are of growing interest for spintronics and optoelectronics because their crystal structure can couple light polarization, electrical charge and electron spin without requiring an external magnetic field. Studying that coupling has traditionally meant fabricating a full device with metal contacts, a step that can introduce defects and other artifacts that obscure the material's intrinsic electronic response. To get around this, the team developed circularly polarized time-resolved surface photovoltage (CP-TRSPV), a technique that tracks how electrical charges separate inside the material under circularly polarized illumination, without a top electrical contact. The method can follow the resulting signal over an unusually wide time window, from nanoseconds to milliseconds.

Researchers at the Institute of Science Tokyo, led by Hiroaki Ishizuka, have developed a quantum-mechanical theory explaining a puzzling electrical behavior in chiral magnets, tracing it to a scattering mechanism related to the decades-old Kondo effect.

Image credit: Institute of Science Tokyo, from Phys.org

Chiral magnets are materials whose atomic-scale magnetic moments twist into helices, vortices and other complex spin textures. One consequence of this chirality is nonreciprocal current: electric current flows more easily in one direction through the material than the other, an effect of growing interest for magnetic sensing and spintronic devices. Most prior theoretical treatments modeled the magnetic moments in these systems as classical, localized spins, even though experiments in materials such as MnSi suggest quantum fluctuations play a significant role - a gap the new theory sets out to close.

Researchers at North Carolina State University, Portland State University and the Air Force Research Laboratory, have demonstrated electrical, reversible control over the "handedness" of chiral phonons in a ferroelectric crystal - a capability the team says could lead to faster, more energy-efficient spintronic devices.

Chiral phonons are collective vibrations that move through a material's atomic lattice in a circular motion, carrying angular momentum that can be transferred to electron spins, giving materials a spintronic function without requiring any magnetic ordering. The NC State group previously showed this angular momentum could generate spin current from a simple thermal gradient in a 2D hybrid perovskite. Until now, though, chiral phonons had only been observed passively - the ability to actively switch their handedness on demand had not been demonstrated. For the new work, the team turned to triglycine sulfate (TGS), a molecular ferroelectric crystal in which structural chirality and ferroelectric polarization are intrinsically coupled: flipping one necessarily flips the other. 

Researchers led by Rice University, the University of Minnesota, and the Paul Scherrer Institute - with additional collaborators at Kyung Hee University, the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Myongji University, the University of West Bohemia, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign - have found spin texture consistent with altermagnetism in ultrathin, epitaxially strained films of ruthenium dioxide (RuO₂), a material whose magnetic status has been debated for years.

Altermagnetism is a recently proposed third class of collinear magnetic order, alongside ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism, in which compensated magnetic sublattices are related by rotation rather than by translation. That symmetry produces momentum-dependent spin splitting in a material's electronic structure even though it carries no net magnetization - a combination that could be useful for miniaturizing and improving RAM architecture in computers. RuO₂ was one of the first materials proposed as an altermagnetic candidate, but a long line of studies on its bulk and strain-relaxed thick-film forms - using x-ray diffraction, neutron diffraction, muon spin rotation, infrared spectroscopy, quantum oscillations, torque magnetometry and other probes - had converged on the conclusion that RuO₂ shows no magnetism at all, leaving the field in a persistent state of debate.

Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS), together with collaborators from the University of Messina, Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Politecnico di Bari and Peking University, have reported two spintronic probabilistic computing systems that accelerate combinatorial optimization while cutting energy consumption. The work, led by Prof. Yang Hyunsoo of the NUS Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was published as a pair of papers.

Both systems are built around magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) operated deliberately in their stochastic regime. Rather than treating thermal fluctuations as a source of error to be suppressed, the devices are used as compact, tunable true random number generators - the physical substrate for probabilistic bits.

A research team led by Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, which also included Forschungszentrum Jülich and JARA, The University of Tokyo, HZB and Institut Polytechnique de Paris, has demonstrated a purely orbitronic device concept in which orbital currents are used directly, without conversion into spin currents, to generate exceptionally large magnetoresistance signals in antiferromagnetic heterostructures. 

Building on recent predictions that orbital current effects can exceed spin-current effects by orders of magnitude, the team shows that these giant orbital currents can be harnessed in practice by replacing conventional spin-dominated magnets with magnets dominated by orbital angular momentum (OAM). This work, led by Dr. Christin Schmitt in the group of Professor Mathias Kläui at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), was carried out with more than twenty international collaborators.

Researchers Shuxia Tao (Department of Applied Physics) and Björn Baumeier (Department of Mathematics and Computer Science) at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) have been awarded funding by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to tackle one of spintronics' most persistent open questions: Chiral-Induced Spin Selectivity (CISS).

The five-year project, named uniCISS, targets the CISS effect - a phenomenon observed for over two decades in which electrons traveling through chiral (spiral-structured) materials are selectively filtered by their quantum spin state. Despite its well-documented experimental occurrence, no complete theoretical framework has been established to explain the underlying mechanism, making deliberate materials engineering around the effect largely impossible.

Researchers from the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, International Kazakh-Turkish University, University of California and Argonne National Laboratory have introduced a predictive synthesis framework to boost the spin-relevant performance of chiral 2D metal halide perovskites (MHPs) for next-generation spintronics. Chiral 2D MHPs are promising materials for spin-optoelectronic devices that exploit the electron’s spin degree of freedom, yet their chiroptical response, quantified by the absorption dissymmetry factor (g_abs), has shown large variability and poor reproducibility. This has hindered the rational design of reliable spintronic components such as circularly polarized LEDs, photodetectors, and spin filters.

To tackle this challenge, the team built a data-driven framework that directly links synthesis “knobs” to chiroptical properties. Using Pearson’s correlation, ANOVA, and Gaussian process regression, they systematically evaluated how solvent choice, annealing temperature, film thickness, and other structural and morphological factors influence g_abs. The analysis reveals solvent choice as the primary driver of variability: acetonitrile (ACN)-processed films consistently exhibit higher and more reproducible g_abs values than films fabricated from dimethylformamide (DMF) or ACN:dimethyl sulfoxide (ACN:DMSO) mixtures. For ACN-based films, the model identifies specific annealing temperature and thickness ranges that maximize g_abs, providing a clear processing playbook instead of ad hoc optimization.