Biography
Leonie Spitz is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Bernina group. She received a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the Technical University of Munich in 2018 and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from the Munich School of Philosophy in 2019. In parallel with her studies, she worked as a research assistant at the neutron spin-echo spectrometer RESEDA at the Maier-Leibnitz Zentrum in Garching from 2016 to 2019. In 2020, she received her Master's degree in Condensed Matter Physics from the Technical University of Munich after completing her Master's thesis on magnetic skyrmion lattices in centrosymmetric crystals in the group of Prof. Yoshinori Tokura at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Wako, Japan and the group of Prof. Christian Pfleiderer at the Technical University of Munich. She then moved to Switzerland to study the ultrafast control of low-dimensional quantum spin systems in the Quantum Criticality and Dynamics group at PSI and ETH Zurich supervised by Prof. Dr. Christian Rüegg. She received her PhD degree in 2025.
Scientific Research
Leonie’s research focusses on non-equilibrium magnetic phenomena in correlated electron systems, with a primary interest in the interplay between spin and lattice degrees of freedom. Using free-electron laser–based X-ray diffraction and table-top laser spectroscopy, she studied the coupling between phonons and magnetic excitations in quantum magnets. Her current projects focus on driving magnetic excitations with circularly polarised THz radiation.
Selected Publications
A complete list of publications can be found on Google Scholar .
Phonon spectrum in the spin-Peierls phase of CuGeO3, L. Spitz, A. Razpopov, S. Biswas, H. Lane, S.E. Nikitin, K. Iida, R. Kajimoto, M. Fujita, M. Arai, M. Mourigal, Ch. Rüegg, R. Valentí, B. Normand, Phys. Rev. B 112, 184302 (2025), https://doi.org/10.1103/jz36-8kz9
Entropy-Assisted, Long-Period Stacking of Honeycomb Layers in an AlB2-type Silicide, L. Spitz, T. Nomoto, S. Kitou, H. Nakao, A. Kikkawa, S. Francoual, Y. Taguchi, R. Arita, Y. Tokura, T.-h. Arima, M. Hirschberger, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 144, 16866-16871 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.2c04995