Electrons in the same material can behave as a group without a preferred direction and, under certain conditions, choose a preferred direction. It's as if the movement that is normally distributed similarly in all directions suddenly acquires a defined orientation. This idiosyncratic behavior was observed by an international team of researchers in a compound formed by uranium, antimony, and tellurium, known by the formula USbTe. The result was published on September 2, 2026, in Nature Communications, in the study "Observation of a spin-textured nematic Kondo lattice."

The phenomenon involves a state called electronic nematicism, in which the spatial organization of electrons begins to exhibit a preferred direction. This state occurs in conjunction with a ferromagnetic state, in which the spins are organized in such a way that they point in a preferred direction. While the ferromagnetic state appears below 125 Kelvin, the electronic nematic state only occurs below 15 Kelvin, about -258 °C. For physicists, observing this combination helps investigate how interactions between electrons can produce unusual collective states of matter.

Among the authors are Brazilian physicists Eduardo Miranda, from the Gleb Wataghin Institute of Physics at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), and Rafael M. Fernandes, from the University of Minnesota, in the United States.

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