Career and research
Spaldin was inspired to search for multiferroics, magnetic ferroelectric materials, by a remark about potential collaboration made by a colleague studying ferroelectrics during her postdoctoral research studying magnetic phenomena at Yale University from 1996 to 1997. [13] She continued to develop the theory of these materials as a new faculty member at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and in 2000 published (under her previous name, Hill) "a seminal article" [14] that for the first time explained why few such materials were known. [15] Following her theoretical predictions, in 2003 she was part of a team that experimentally demonstrated the multiferroic properties of bismuth ferrite, BiFeO3. [16] Over the next years she was involved in a number of developments in the rapidly emerging field of multiferroics, including the first demonstration of electric-field control of magnetism in BiFeO3 [17] (selected by Science magazine as one of their "Areas to watch" in their 2007 Breakthroughs of the Year section), the discovery of conducting ferroelectric domain walls [18] and a strain-driven morphotropic phase boundary, [19] again in BiFeO3, and the identification of new mechanisms for multiferroicity, for example the improper geometric ferroelectricity in YMnO3. [20] In the same time period, she developed and implemented methodology to allow application of finite electric and magnetic fields to metal-insulator heterostructures within the density functional theory formalism, [21] allowing her to solve the long-standing problem of the origin of the dielectric dead layer in capacitors [22] and to identify previously unknown routes to magnetoelectric coupling. [23]
Spaldin moved from UCSB to ETH Zurich in 2010. [12] Since then, three particular new directions stand out in her research portfolio. One is the development of the concept and formalism of magnetic multipoles, which require a theory of magnetism beyond the usual magnetic-dipole level. In addition to their importance for magnetoelectric coupling, [24] these have proved relevant for understanding the occurrence of magnetism at the surfaces of compensated antiferromagnets [25] as well as for characterizing phenomena as diverse as altermagnetism [26] and magnetic skyrmions. [27] Second, the establishment of Dynamical Multiferroicity, [28] which spawned interest in so-called chiral phonons and their associated magnetic moments. [29] And third, the unexpected application of multiferroics in other more fundamental branches of physics: She designed a new multiferroic with the precise specifications required to allow a solid-state search for the electric dipole moment of the electron [30] and identified a multiferroic with a symmetry-lowering phase trainsition that generates the crystallographic equivalent of cosmic strings. [31] These "cross-over" projects led to a current interest in dark-matter direct detection.
Her publications are listed on Google scholar. [4]
Awards and honours
Spaldin was the 2010 winner of the American Physical Society's James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials, [32] the winner of the Rössler Prize of the ETH Zurich Foundation in 2012, [33] the 2015 winner of the Körber European Science Prize for "laying the theoretical foundation for the new family of multiferroic materials" [16] [12] [14] and one of the laureates of the 2017 L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science. [34] In November 2017 she was awarded the Lise-Meitner Lectureship of the Austrian and German Physical Societies in Vienna [35] [36] and in 2019 she won the Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist. [2] [37] In 2021 she received the IUPAP Magnetism Award and Néel Medal, [38] and in 2022 the Europhysics Prize of the European Physical Society [39] and the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics. [40] In 2023, she won the Gothenburg Lise Meitner Award. [41]
Spaldin is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2008), the Materials Research Society (2011), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2013) [12] and the Royal Society (2017), [42] an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and a member of Academia Europaea (2021) [43] and the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (2021). [44] She is a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Engineering (2019), [45] the French Academy of Sciences (2021), the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2022) and the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina (2022). [46] She is an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society [47] and a Fellow-Ambassadeur of the CNRS. [48]
Teaching
Spaldin has twice received the ETH Golden Owl for Teaching Excellence [51] as well as the ETH Award for Best Teaching. [52] Some of her lectures are available on her youtube channel. [53] She coordinated the revision of her Department's BSc Curriculum in Materials and documented it in a blog. Her textbook on Magnetic Materials is published by Cambridge University Press. [54]
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