Speaker
Description
For many years, since the beginning of the 19th century, the existence of magnetism in low dimen-sions has been both desired and controversial. It was long thought, that magnetic orders in low di-mensional systems could not be realized at temperatures different from zero. At least, this was what the Mermin-Wagner theorem stated for isolated Heisenberg spins. The scarcity of low-dimensional materials with magnetic properties, and the partial understanding of the role of spin-anisotropy have supported this picture for several decades. In three-dimensions, magnetism has revolutionized our everyday life, enabling familiar technologies which are of common use. A few examples include com-puters’ memories, RAM, hard-disks, key cards, credit cards, electric batteries, light, and distance sen-sors. This relentless pace of development has motivated the search for magnetism in systems with increasingly smaller sizes.
With cooperation of experimental and theoretical physics, researchers discovered that spin-anisotropy can stabilize low-dimensional magnetism. In this, spin-orbit coupling plays an important role. Surface experimental probes, such as angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy provide researchers access to the electronic structure of solids. Despite the advances in the field, recently, new forms of surface lo-cal magnetism completely different from standard descriptions have appeared, with relevance in quan-tum transport information, dissipationless transport, and quantum sensing.
Here, I aim to give an overview of a new powerful methodology to uncover hidden phases of elec-trons, including spins, and magnetism which was so fare elusive, and that we were able to uncover for the first time.
References to our recent works on this topic:
Nature 626, 752–758 (2024)
Nature Physics 19, 1135–1142 (2023)
Nature Physics 20, 1103–1109 (2024)
Nature Physics 21, 110–117 (2025)
Nature Communications 16, 4495 (2025)
Physical Review Letters 134, 066501 (2025)