Scientists figured out how to make heat take a sharp 'sideways' turn inside a material, even without using magnets to pull it.
April 6, 2026
Original Paper
Observation of anomalous thermal Hall effect in altermagnets
arXiv · 2604.03183
The Takeaway
Usually, pushing heat to the side requires a strong magnetic field, but this new class of 'altermagnets' does it naturally. This reveals a strange new way to control how energy moves through solids without needing external magnets.
From the abstract
Altermagnets, recently proposed as a third category of collinear magnets, combine the features of zero net magnetization in antiferromagnets and the spin splitting in ferromagnets. While abundant spectroscopic evidence for altermagnetism has been reported, experimental observation of the anomalous Hall effect, a hallmark of ferromagnetism, remains scarce. Here, we present systematic measurements of the thermal Hall effect in two representative altermagnet candidates, MnTe and CrSb. In both mater