Electrons moving through this twisted structure behaved in unexpected ways. The researchers traced this behavior to the material having both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic characteristics at once.

What makes two magnetic behaviors in one material special?

The two behaviors are normally opposites. Ferromagnetic materials — the familiar kind, like iron — are magnetic. Antiferromagnets have a net magnetization of zero, because their internal magnetic moments cancel each other out.

"Finding a single material that combines both of these properties is interesting fundamentally," Liu said.

The discovery involved two teams working in parallel. Colleagues at Harvard University, led by co-corresponding author Dr. Suyang Xu, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences, were investigating the same material at the same time. The teams regularly shared and compared results from their complementary experiments, which Liu described as bringing together different pieces of the puzzle.

Through extensive additional measurements, the researchers confirmed that the material's unusual atomic organization is a key factor governing how electrons travel through it.

Why does this matter for computer memory?

The combined properties could prove valuable for future magnetic memory technologies. Antiferromagnetic materials offer two potential advantages over conventional ferromagnets: they generally resist perturbations from external magnetic fields better, and they can operate more quickly.

"If those advantages can be harnessed, memory devices could potentially become both faster and more robust," Liu said. That prospect remains speculative for now — the study reports fundamental physics, not a working device, and translating laboratory findings into commercial technology typically takes years.

Could hundreds of other compounds hide similar structures?

Computational analyses by the team suggest the answer may be yes. Their modeling indicates that hundreds of related compounds could host superlattice structures similar to the one found in UOTe.

"This study provides a new way of looking for materials with these unusual properties," Liu said. "Instead of focusing only on the fundamental atomic arrangement, we can also now explore larger superstructures that might influence how electrons behave."

The discovery also underscores the value of revisiting old materials with modern tools. "Uranium oxytelluride has been known since the 1960s, but it has been largely ignored in research since then," Liu said. "Now, with today's techniques, we're able to uncover and study properties that previously were hidden."

Additional corresponding authors of the Nature article include Dr. Philip Kim of Harvard and Dr. Jianxiang Qiu, now at the University of California, Berkeley. The paper, "A chiral superlattice route to spin-split topological antiferromagnetism," carries the DOI 10.1038/s41586-026-11073-7.