A crystal known for decades has offered a new clue to researchers exploring how future electronics might work. UT Dallas physicist Mengke Liu and collaborators found a previously overlooked atomic pattern in uranium oxytelluride, a material abbreviated UOTe.
For Richardson, the connection is a scientist at its local university: Liu joined the UT Dallas faculty in 2025. The work began during her postdoctoral research at Harvard, according to the university's Oct. 7, 2026, announcement.
The team's paper appeared in Nature on Oct. 7. It describes a chiral superlattice, an arrangement with a handedness, and reports that this structure changes the behavior of electrons in an antiferromagnet. Among the findings was a spin-polarized current, an important research target for spintronics, which investigates ways to use electron spin in electronic technology.
Liu used microscopy to spot the structure, then worked with collaborators conducting other experiments to understand its effects. The university says the findings could inform research into magnetic memory that operates more quickly and withstands outside magnetic interference better.
That is a possible direction for future devices, not a new memory product ready for sale. The researchers also used calculations to identify related compounds that could contain similar structures, giving other experiments places to look next.