ScienceNov 4, 2026, 9:57 PM UTC·2 min read

Magnons live longer than expected, boosting spintronics hopes

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute found that magnons hold their energy far longer than assumed, a finding that could aid low-power spintronic computing.

Illustration of magnetic spin waves travelling through a crystal lattice struck by a laser pulse. — Image: CHIP Polska - Technologie mamy we krwi!

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland have found that magnons, the quantum excitations of spin waves, retain their energy much longer than previously thought. The result strengthens the case for spintronics, a technology that could process information with far less energy than conventional electronics. The details were published in Nature Communications.

Why spin instead of charge

Today's processors move electric charge through circuits. That approach has produced extremely capable devices, but current flow wastes energy as heat, and shrinking transistors further is getting harder. Spintronics offers an alternative by using not only the electron's charge but also its spin, a quantum property tied to its magnetic moment.

When electron spins in a material move in a coordinated way, they form spin waves, and their quantum excitations are called magnons. Magnons can carry energy and information through a material without electrons having to travel the way they do in standard circuits, which makes them an attractive candidate for future computing.

What the experiment showed

The team studied copper oxide, a magnetic material with strong coupling between magnetism and atomic vibrations. An extremely short, intense laser pulse excited the electrons, changed their spins and created magnons, all within femtoseconds. The magnetic excitations then interacted with one another, forming a more disordered set of waves, before passing energy to vibrations of the crystal lattice known as phonons.

The key observation concerned that last step. Energy transfer from magnons to phonons took place only on the nanosecond scale, much longer than the researchers expected for a material with such strong magnetic and atomic interactions.

Capturing the process required several complementary methods: intense X-ray pulses from a free-electron laser, pump-probe measurements, and a new application of time-resolved resonant inelastic X-ray scattering combined with two known X-ray techniques. This let the team follow processes across very different timescales.

The researchers believe differences between the energy-momentum relationships of magnons and phonons limit how efficiently energy passes between them. Better understanding of this mechanism could help design materials in which magnon lifetimes are deliberately controlled, with possible uses in low-power logic circuits, spintronic devices and new computing architectures.

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Tags:magnonsspintronicspaul scherrer institutenature communicationsenergy-efficient computing