Researchers have fashioned a layered topological material into a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) tip that senses spin-related electronic states at atomic resolution.

The research team, led by Chen Xianhui and Wang Zhenyu from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), together with Xiang Bin from USTC, Liu Junwei from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and other collaborators, used this probe to obtain converging evidence for two-dimensional d-wave altermagnetic order on the surface of KV₂Se₂O.

The study was published online in Nature on Oct. 13.