Recently, a research work entitled “Control of spin currents by magnon interference in a canted antiferromagnet”, jointly conducted by Associate Researcher Jijun Chen and Assistant Researcher Lutong Sheng at the Shenzhen International Quantum Academy, in collaboration with Prof. Dirk Grundler’s group at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and Prof. Haiming Yu’s group at Beihang University, was selected by Nature Physics as a cover article for the May’s issue and was also highlighted in a News & Views feature.

Controlling the spin current lies at the heart of spintronics and its applications. In ferromagnetic materials, due to the breaking of time-reversal symmetry, spin currents generated by the spin-pumping effect necessarily possess right-handed chirality. In contrast, antiferromagnets intrinsically host two sublattices with opposite chiralities, offering a unique platform for manipulating spin-current chirality. In this work, the research team, for the first time, observed coherent interference of antiferromagnetic spin waves in the antiferromagnetic insulator α-Fe₂O₃. By innovatively combining electrical and optical characterization techniques, they systematically revealed the interference fringe distributions of spin waves in both the frequency and real-space domains, and successfully achieved a breakthrough functionality that enables precise control of the output spin-current chirality by tuning the spin-wave frequency. This breakthrough result opens up new possibilities for logic operations and computing technologies based on antiferromagnetic chirality.