Professor Masaaki Tanaka and his colleagues at the Graduate School of Engineering, in collaboration with the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA), Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Kyoto Sangyo University, have succeeded in clarifying the mechanism of ferromagnetism at the atomic level in ferromagnetic semiconductors. Using the large synchrotron radiation facility Spring-8, the researchers extracted only the magnetic information of Mn atoms in (Ga,Mn)As and observed in detail the process of Mn atoms changing from a paramagnetic to a ferromagnetic state as the temperature drops, thereby clarifying the mechanism of ferromagnetism at the atomic level. The study is expected to be useful for improving the performance of ferromagnetic semiconductors and for developing guidelines for room-temperature operation of next-generation spintronic devices. The paper was published in the December 4 electronic edition of the Journal of Applied Physics in the United States, and was selected for the journal’s cover and published together with a commentary as a Featured Article.