This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A University of Texas at Dallas scientist and her colleagues have discovered an unusual atomic pattern in a uranium-based material that gives it a rare combination of magnetic properties, a finding that could open new pathways for designing advanced electronic and computer memory devices. Mengke Liu, an assistant professor of physics in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and her collaborators found a previously unrecognized chiral superlattice in a crystal of uranium oxytelluride (UOTe).
Liu is a corresponding author of a study detailing the research that was published online Oct. 7 in the journal Nature. The discovery began when Liu was a Harvard Quantum Initiative postdoctoral fellow, a position she held before joining the UT Dallas faculty in 2025. One of Liu's collaborators, Dr.
Sheng Ran, associate professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis, gave Liu crystals of a uranium compound that he had synthesized for her to analyze. Liu, an experimental physicist and an expert in imaging technology, was using transmission electron microscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy to examine and generate high-resolution images of materials' surfaces at the atomic scale.
Using the techniques, she detected in the UOTe sample a repeating, twisted structural pattern of atoms called a chiral superlattice. Chiral means the spiral structures are twisted predominantly in a left-handed or right-handed direction. Electrons moving through this structure behaved in unexpected ways, which the researchers determined was the result of the material having both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic characteristics.
"I was originally studying this material for an entirely different reason," Liu said. "When I examined it with high-resolution microscopy, I found a naturally occurring superstructure no one had recognized before." Ferromagnetic materials are magnetic, while antiferromagnets have a net magnetization of zero. "Finding a single material that combines both of these properties is interesting fundamentally," Liu said.
Liu's colleagues at Harvard University, led by co-corresponding author Dr. Loeb associate professor of the natural sciences, were simultaneously investigating the same material. The two teams regularly shared and compared the findings from their complementary experiments, which brought together different pieces of the puzzle.
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