Lab News

The search for sustainable energy solutions is of utmost priority in modern society. Overcoming the challenges of energy conversion and storage is critical to reducing dependence on fossil fuels and harnessing renewable sources. Dielectric materials hold great promise for meeting these challenges, but current limitations prevent their widespread use.

The IEEE Magnetics Society 2023 Early Career Award goes to Claire Donnelly, a former member of LMX and the Mesoscopic Systems Group, for her excellent work on developing x-ray techniques for imaging magnetic structures in three dimensions.

Starting 1. December 2022, Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Lippert will be the new head of the Laboratory for Multiscale Materials Experiments (LMX). He follows Prof. Dr. Laura Heyderman, our first laboratory head who successfully formed and established the LMX in the PSI landscape as a Centre of Materials.

The Young Scientist Award 2020 of the European Magnetism Association (EMA) 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 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.

Dr Pascal Puphal (currently a Postdoc at PSI, LMX, Solid State Chemistry Group) has recently been awarded with the DGKK young researcher price from the German Crystal Growth Community on his Ph.D. work performed in the group of Cornelius Krellner at the Geothe University Frankfurt am Main on the topic "Tuning two dimensional Cu-based quantum spin systems". The work covers the stabilization and proof of a 2D dimer structure by Sr substitution in Han Purple and the research of novel kagome materials of the prominent quantum spin liquid candidate herbertsmithite by the hydrothermal route.