February 2026

Researchers from the University of Maryland, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Nankai University, Cornell University, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, University of California, University of Tennessee, Air Force Research Laboratory and Rice University recently reported the first experimental realization of non-volatile, electrical control of magnetism in a two-dimensional (2D) material system. The collaborative work demonstrates a robust interferroic magnetoelectric coupling in a van der Waals heterostructure made of atomic layers of ferroelectric CuCrP₂S₆ and ferromagnetic Fe₃GeTe₂ - marking a milestone for 2D multiferroic research and energy-efficient spintronic applications.

At the heart of this work lies the long-standing challenge of stabilizing ferroic order in truly two-dimensional materials. While ferroelectric and ferromagnetic phenomena are both well-established in bulk materials, their coexistence in 2D is difficult to maintain due to depolarization fields and thermal fluctuations that destabilize long-range order. The team overcame these limitations by stacking exfoliated layers of the ferroelectric CuCrP₂S₆ and ferromagnetic Fe₃GeTe₂ with atomically clean interfaces, enabling short-range, interfacial coupling between their ferroic orders.

Researchers from Italy's Università degli Studi di Salerno, CNR-SPIN and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) recently found that the noncentrosymmetric superconductor niobium–rhenium (NbRe) could be the long-sought candidate for intrinsic spin-triplet pairing - a key ingredient for future superconducting spintronics and quantum computers.

Spin-triplet superconductors differ fundamentally from conventional “singlet” superconductors: their Cooper pairs carry spin as well as charge. This allows them to sustain spin-polarized supercurrents that can travel without resistance. Such a property would enable lossless spin transmission and stability in quantum information systems - a long-standing challenge in the field.

Researchers from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB), Donostia International Physics Center, Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden and IMDEA Nanoscience have identified ferromagnetic hexagonal close-packed (hcp) cobalt as a prototypical magnetic nodal-line semimetal that remains robust at room temperature, turning a classic ferromagnet into a highly tunable topological platform for spintronics.

Cobalt has long been regarded as a textbook elemental ferromagnet with a supposedly well-understood band structure, examined in detail for over 40 years. Using spin- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (spin-ARPES) at the BESSY II synchrotron, the team now observes entangled, spin-polarized bands that cross along extended paths in momentum space without opening an energy gap, even at room temperature. These measurements reveal a dense network of magnetic nodal lines - topological band crossings between two spin-polarized states - that give rise to fast, robust charge carriers central to future information and spin-based technologies.