Completing Magnetic Group Theory in Nature Communications

Our collaboration’s work on completing the group theory of magnetic crystals was published this past week in Nature Communications.

For over 50 years, researchers have leveraged the mathematical (group) theory of of crystal symmetries to analyze and predict new phenomena in solid-state materials without magnetism. However, despite a recent flurry of theoretical and experimental results, the much more complicated group theory of magnetic materials has remained incomplete, despite awareness of its existence for over 70 years. Writing this past week in Nature Communications and representing four years of intense study, our collaboration has finally completed the group theory of magnetic crystals. We also used the results to perform a complete classification of magnetic topological phases. A companion work applying our theory to the high-throughput discovery of magnetic topological materials was published in Nature this past year, and a press release from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign is available here.

Oct. 20, 2021