The European Physical Society announced Saturday that its 2026 Europhysics Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Condensed Matter Physics has been awarded to Dr. Libor Šmejkal, Prof. Jairo Sinova, and Prof. Tomas Jungwirth for discovering altermagnetism, a third class of magnetism that eliminates the central design constraint holding back spintronic AI chips while operating naturally at terahertz speeds. The award, now in its 42nd edition, will be formally presented on September 22, 2026, at the 32nd General Conference of the EPS Condensed Matter Division (CMD32) in Graz, Austria. The recognition arrives less than two years after the journal Science named altermagnetism one of the top physics breakthroughs of 2024, and the field has since generated more than 1,000 subsequent studies. A review in Nature Physics published in July 2026 positions altermagnetic spintronics as the next evolutionary step from ferromagnetic STT-MRAM memory. Altermagnets look like antiferromagnets with zero net magnetization, but their opposing-spin sublattices are connected by rotation or mirror symmetry rather than inversion or translation.