Avoided Ferromagnetic Quantum Criticality: State-of-the-Art & Future Opportunities
| Date/Time: | Monday, 30 Mar 2015 from 4:10 pm to 5:00 pm |
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| Location: | Physics 0003 |
| Phone: | 515-294-5441 |
| Channel: | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences |
| Actions: | Download iCal/vCal | Email Reminder |
ABSTRACT: The field of Condensed Matter Physics is driven by the discovery and design of new electronic states such as unconventional superconductivity, magnetic spirals, and electron liquid crystals. Such new states emerge when matter undergoes a continuous transition from a disordered to an ordered state under the action of a non-thermal control parameter such as high pressure, magnetic field or chemical substitution. Neutron scattering has three key advantages over other spectroscopic techniques commonly used to probe this subtle physics: extremely high energy resolution, sensitivity to the spin component of the magnetism and access to temperatures below 1 K, all combined in a single probe. However, up to now the high energy resolution capability of the technique has been largely overlooked. Similarly, availability of the required large, high purity materials is limited. In this talk I will review our progress in understanding of new electronic states in the induced moment ferromagnets, heavy fermion compounds and U-based unconventional superconductors using elastic and inelastic neutron scattering and outline future applications of the low energy neutron scattering.
BIO: I am now an Institute research fellow at the Max Plank Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, Germany. I received my PhD in Physics from the University of Edinburgh, UK in 2003 and later worked as a postdoc at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Brookhaven National Lab, and the University of Edinburgh. My primary research objective is discovery and design of unconventional electronic states in bulk materials near ferromagnetic and structural instabilities. Such electronic states include some of the most topical and exciting phenomena of contemporary physics: topologically protected local spin textures like magnetic skyrmions, magnetic fluctuation driven spin density waves and superconductivity without phonons.