MIT physicists have demonstrated a new form of magnetism that could one day be harnessed to build faster, denser, and less power-hungry “spintronic” memory chips. The team discovered the new p-wave magnetism in nickel iodide (NiI 2 ), a two-dimensional crystalline material that they synthesized in the lab. “We showed that this new form of magnetism can be manipulated electrically,” says Qian Song, a research scientist in MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory. Such a signal would confirm that the traveling electrons’ spins align because of the spiral configuration, and furthermore, that the material does in fact exhibit p-wave magnetism. Such is a telltale signature of p-wave magnetism, here observed for the first time.