A crystal known since the 1960s has given a UT Dallas physicist a new question to investigate: how can its hidden atomic twist help explain its unusual magnetism?
Mengke Liu, an assistant professor at the Richardson university, and collaborators identified that twist in uranium oxytelluride. UT Dallas described the work in an Oct. 7 announcement, the same day the study appeared online in Nature.
The repeating spiral, called a chiral superlattice, emerged in high-resolution microscopy. Liu began the investigation while at Harvard before joining UT Dallas in 2025. Researchers at Harvard and Washington University in St. Louis also contributed.
The material combines ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic characteristics. Those different magnetic behaviors matter because antiferromagnets can offer advantages in speed and resistance to outside magnetic fields. The researchers see possible uses in computer memory, but those applications remain a prospect, not a finished device.
The finding also gives scientists another reason to revisit familiar substances. According to UT Dallas, calculations suggest hundreds of related compounds might contain similar structures.
Source: UT Dallas News Center, Oct. 7, 2026.
https://news.utdallas.edu/science-technology/hidden-spiral-structure-in-crystal-material-2026/
