
LMX: Laboratory for Multiscale materials eXperiments
The Laboratory for Multiscale materials eXperiments (LMX) focusses on designing novel functional materials in poly- and single crystalline form, as thin films and as multilayers. Read more about LMX
News
Young Scientist Award 2020
The Young Scientist Award 2020 goes to Claire Donnelly for advances in the experimental characterization of spin textures and their dynamics in three dimensions with X-ray techniques.
Claire Donnelly, a former Ph.D and postdoc at PSI in the Mesoscopic Systems Group, is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. She received her PhD in 2017 from the ETH Zurich for her work on hard X-ray tomography of three-dimensional magnetic structures based at the Paul Scherrer Institute. Following a postdoc at the ETH Zurich, she moved to the University of Cambridge and the Cavendish in January 2019, where she is focusing on the dynamics of three-dimensional magnetic nanostructures.
Her research focuses on three dimensional magnetic systems, which she studies using sophisticated synchorotron X-rays to determine the three-dimensional magnetic configurations, and their dynamic behaviour, at the nanoscale.
TecDay: LMX meets Hohe Promenade
TecDay is an SATW initiative that was developed at the Kantonsschule Limmattal in 2007 and has since been rolled out to more than 60 secondary schools across Switzerland. By the end of 2017 it had reached around 45,000 students and 5,000 teachers. In December 2019 the LMX contributed in one module, that received a total of 16 students over the course of a morning. The module was organized in three different “stations”, each one focusing on one topic or area that the group is working on.
Scientific Highlights
Magnetic vortices come full circle
The first experimental observation of three-dimensional magnetic ‘vortex rings’ provides fundamental insight into intricate nanoscale structures inside bulk magnets, and offers fresh perspectives for magnetic devices.
Re(1−x)Mox as an ideal test case of time-reversal symmetry breaking in unconventional superconductors
Non-centrosymmetric superconductors (NCSCs) are promising candidates in the search for unconventional and topological superconductivity. The α-Mn-type rhenium-based alloys represent excellent examples of NCSCs, where spontaneous magneticfields, peculiar to time-reversal symmetry (TRS) breaking, have been shown to develop in the superconducting phase. By converse, TRS is preserved in many other isostructural NCSCs, thus leaving the key question about its origin fully open. Here, we consider ...
Electroless Deposition of Ni–Fe Alloys on Scaffolds for 3D Nanomagnetism
3D magnetic nanostructures are of great interest due to the possibility to design novel properties and the benefits for both technological applications such as high-density data storage, as well as more fundamental studies.
One of the main challenges facing the realization of these three-dimensional systems is their fabrication, which includes the deposition of magnetic materials on 3D surfaces. In this work, the electroless deposition of Ni–Fe
on a 3D-printed, non-conductive microstructure is presented.
Strain engineering of the charge and spin-orbital interactions in Sr2IrO4
Understanding the relationship between entangled degrees of freedom (DOF) is a central problem in correlated materials and the possibility to influence their balance is promising toward realizing novel functionalities. In Sr2IrO4, the interaction between spin–orbit coupling and electron correlations induces an exotic ground state with magnetotransport properties promising for antiferromagnetic spintronics applications.
Relation between microscopic interactions and macroscopic properties in ferroics
The driving force in materials to spontaneously form states with magnetic or electric order is of fundamental importance for basic research and device technology. The macroscopic properties and functionalities of these ferroics depend on the size, distribution and morphology of domains; that is, of regions across which such uniform order is maintained. Typically, extrinsic factors such as strain profiles, grain size or annealing procedures control the size and shape of the domains, whereas intrinsic parameters are often difficult to extract due to the complexity of a processed material. Here, we achieve this separation ...