材料科学：2025–2026 年度综述

An annual survey of the cond-mat.mtrl-sci arXiv category, covering research published from September 2025 – August 2026. Built on a close-reading set of 120 papers and organised into 44 chapters, it maps the year by the field's research sub-directions.

Book framework (share of the year's output):

• Ultrafast Dynamics and Spin-Orbit Coupled Phenomena (61.9%) — Investigates ultrafast demagnetization, topological Hall effects, and field-controlled altermagnetic transitions in metallic and 2D systems.
• Interfacial Magnetoelectric and Chiral vdW Heterostructures (9.1%) — Explores interfacial chirality, ferroelectric-antiferromagnetic coupling, and spin polarization engineering in van der Waals heterostructures.
• High-Pressure Crystal Design and Thermodynamic Stability (6.7%) — Focuses on pressure-induced phase transitions, crystal structure prediction, and thermodynamic stability of single crystals and perovskites.
• Electronic and Structural Phase Transitions in Dichalcogenides (4.7%) — Examines electronic, optical, and structural phase transitions in transition metal dichalcogenides and related semiconducting materials.
• Machine Learning Interatomic Potentials and Material Discovery (4.6%) — Develops universal machine learning interatomic potentials and active learning strategies for accurate materials modeling and discovery.
• Advanced Density Functional Theory and Altermagnetism (3.4%) — Advances time-dependent and geometric DFT methods to study charge dynamics, altermagnetism, and photocatalytic mechanisms.
• Topological Quantum Geometry and Magnetic Transport (2.7%) — Studies quantum geometry effects, topological phononics, and anomalous transport in topological insulators and magnetic crystals.
• Phonon Thermal Transport and Spectroscopic Characterization (2.2%) — Analyzes lattice dynamics, phonon thermal Hall effects, and magneto-infrared spectroscopy signatures in crystalline materials.
• Hybrid Perovskites and Low-Dimensional Excitonic Systems (1.5%) — Investigates hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites, Janus skyrmions, and exciton dynamics in low-dimensional semiconductor structures.
• Anomalous Hall and Nonlinear Orbital Magnetoelectric Effects (1.5%) — Characterizes intrinsic anomalous Hall, Nernst, and nonlinear orbital effects driven by Berry curvature in kagome and Dirac magnets.

Each sub-direction is covered across three chapters — how it framed its questions, the strength of its key findings, and its open debates and frontiers — so the reader gets a traceable picture of what this part of the field actually produced over the year.