Nicola Spaldin | |
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![]() Nicola Spaldin at the Royal Society admissions day in London, July 2017 | |
Born | 1969 (age 55–56) [1] Sunderland, UK |
Alma mater | University of Cambridge (BA) University of California, Berkeley (PhD) |
Awards | James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials (2010) Rössler Prize (2012) Körber European Science Prize (2015) L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award (2017) Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist (2019) [2] IUPAP Magnetism Prize and Néel Medal (2021) Europhysics Prize (2022) Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics (2022) Gothenburg Physics Centre Lise Meitner Award (2023) CNRS Fellow-Ambassadeur (2024) Doctor of Science (honoris causa), Queens University, Belfast (2024) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions | ETH Zurich University of California, Santa Barbara Yale University |
Thesis | Calculating the electronic properties of semiconductor nanostructures (1996) |
Website | www |
Nicola Ann Spaldin (born 1969) [5] [1] FRS is professor of materials science at ETH Zurich, known for her pioneering research on multiferroics. [6] [4] [7] [8] [9] [10]
A native of Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, England, Spaldin earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in natural sciences from the University of Cambridge in 1991, and a PhD in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996. [11] [12]
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]
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]
Spaldin is a member of the ERC Scientific Council [49] and a founding Lead Editor of Physical Review Research. [50]
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]
In physics and materials science, ferroelectricity is a characteristic of certain materials that have a spontaneous electric polarization that can be reversed by the application of an external electric field. All ferroelectrics are also piezoelectric and pyroelectric, with the additional property that their natural electrical polarization is reversible. The term is used in analogy to ferromagnetism, in which a material exhibits a permanent magnetic moment. Ferromagnetism was already known when ferroelectricity was discovered in 1920 in Rochelle salt by American physicist Joseph Valasek. Thus, the prefix ferro, meaning iron, was used to describe the property despite the fact that most ferroelectric materials do not contain iron. Materials that are both ferroelectric and ferromagnetic are known as multiferroics.
Albert Fert is a French physicist and one of the discoverers of giant magnetoresistance which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disks. Currently, he is an emeritus professor at Paris-Saclay University in Orsay, scientific director of a joint laboratory between the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and Thales Group, and adjunct professor at Michigan State University. He was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics together with Peter Grünberg.
Multiferroics are defined as materials that exhibit more than one of the primary ferroic properties in the same phase:
Bismuth ferrite (BiFeO3, also commonly referred to as BFO in materials science) is an inorganic chemical compound with perovskite structure and one of the most promising multiferroic materials. The room-temperature phase of BiFeO3 is classed as rhombohedral belonging to the space group R3c. It is synthesized in bulk and thin film form and both its antiferromagnetic (G type ordering) Néel temperature (approximately 653 K) and ferroelectric Curie temperature are well above room temperature (approximately 1100K). Ferroelectric polarization occurs along the pseudocubic direction () with a magnitude of 90–95 μC/cm2.
Magnetocapacitance is a property of some dielectric, insulating materials, and metal–insulator–metal heterostructures that exhibit a change in the value of their capacitance when an external magnetic field is applied to them. Magnetocapacitance can be an intrinsic property of some dielectric materials, such as multiferroic compounds like BiMnO3, or can be a manifest of properties extrinsic to the dielectric but present in capacitance structures like Pd, Al2O3, and Al.
Katsunori Wakabayashi is a physicist at the International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA), National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), Japan. He is an authority and leading researcher in nanotechnology in the area of energy states of single wall carbon nanotubes (SWCN). His research is notable for the edge effects of the nanographene materials, which is a part of the single layer graphene. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2000 from University of Tsukuba in Japan. From 2000 to 2009 he was an assistant professor at Department of Quantum Matter in Hiroshima University, Japan. From 2009, he is an Independent Scientist at International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (WPI-MANA), National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan. Beside the above primary research position, he was a visiting scholar at ETH-Zurich, Switzerland from 2003 to 2005, also had a concurrent position as PRESTO researcher in Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST).
Jeroen van den Brink is a theoretical condensed matter physicist, director at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research, IFW Dresden and professor at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany. Van den Brink is known for contributions to the field of strongly correlated materials, in particular for proposals on magnetic and orbital ordering, mechanisms for multiferroicity and the theory of Resonant Inelastic X-Ray Scattering (RIXS).
In its most general form, the magnetoelectric effect (ME) denotes any coupling between the magnetic and the electric properties of a material. The first example of such an effect was described by Wilhelm Röntgen in 1888, who found that a dielectric material moving through an electric field would become magnetized. A material where such a coupling is intrinsically present is called a magnetoelectric.
In Physics, antisymmetric exchange, also known as the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya interaction (DMI), is a contribution to the total magnetic exchange interaction between two neighboring magnetic spins, and . Quantitatively, it is a term in the Hamiltonian which can be written as
In electromagnetism, a toroidal moment is an independent term in the multipole expansion of electromagnetic fields besides magnetic and electric multipoles. In the electrostatic multipole expansion, all charge and current distributions can be expanded into a complete set of electric and magnetic multipole coefficients. However, additional terms arise in an electrodynamic multipole expansion. The coefficients of these terms are given by the toroidal multipole moments as well as time derivatives of the electric and magnetic multipole moments. While electric dipoles can be understood as separated charges and magnetic dipoles as circular currents, axial toroidal dipoles describes toroidal (donut-shaped) charge arrangements whereas polar toroidal dipole correspond to the field of a solenoid bent into a torus.
A domain wall is a term used in physics which can have similar meanings in magnetism, optics, or string theory. These phenomena can all be generically described as topological solitons which occur whenever a discrete symmetry is spontaneously broken.
The interface between lanthanum aluminate (LaAlO3) and strontium titanate (SrTiO3) is a notable materials interface because it exhibits properties not found in its constituent materials. Individually, LaAlO3 and SrTiO3 are non-magnetic insulators, yet LaAlO3/SrTiO3 interfaces can exhibit electrical metallic conductivity, superconductivity, ferromagnetism, large negative in-plane magnetoresistance, and giant persistent photoconductivity. The study of how these properties emerge at the LaAlO3/SrTiO3 interface is a growing area of research in condensed matter physics.
A polar metal, metallic ferroelectric, or ferroelectric metal is a metal that contains an electric dipole moment. Its components have an ordered electric dipole. Such metals should be unexpected, because the charge should conduct by way of the free electrons in the metal and neutralize the polarized charge. However they do exist. Probably the first report of a polar metal was in single crystals of the cuprate superconductors YBa2Cu3O7−δ. A polarization was observed along one (001) axis by pyroelectric effect measurements, and the sign of the polarization was shown to be reversible, while its magnitude could be increased by poling with an electric field. The polarization was found to disappear in the superconducting state. The lattice distortions responsible were considered to be a result of oxygen ion displacements induced by doped charges that break inversion symmetry. The effect was utilized for fabrication of pyroelectric detectors for space applications, having the advantage of large pyroelectric coefficient and low intrinsic resistance. Another substance family that can produce a polar metal is the nickelate perovskites. One example interpreted to show polar metallic behavior is lanthanum nickelate, LaNiO3. A thin film of LaNiO3 grown on the (111) crystal face of lanthanum aluminate, (LaAlO3) was interpreted to be both conductor and a polar material at room temperature. The resistivity of this system, however, shows an upturn with decreasing temperature, hence does not strictly adhere to the definition of a metal. Also, when grown 3 or 4 unit cells thick (1-2 nm) on the (100) crystal face of LaAlO3, the LaNiO3 can be a polar insulator or polar metal depending on the atomic termination of the surface. Lithium osmate, LiOsO3 also undergoes a ferrorelectric transition when it is cooled below 140K. The point group changes from R3c to R3c losing its centrosymmetry. At room temperature and below, lithium osmate is an electric conductor, in single crystal, polycrystalline or powder forms, and the ferroelectric form only appears below 140K. Above 140K the material behaves like a normal metal. Artificial two-dimensional polar metal by charge transfer to a ferroelectric insulator has been realized in LaAlO3/Ba0.8Sr0.2TiO3/SrTiO3 complex oxide heterostructures.
Sinéad Majella Griffin is an Irish physicist working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on condensed matter physics and materials science. She won the 2017 Swiss Physical Society Award in General Physics.
Amnon Aharony is an Israeli Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University, Israel and in the Physics Department of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. After years of research on statistical physics, his current research focuses on condensed matter theory, especially in mesoscopic physics and spintronics. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of several other academies. He also received several prizes, including the Rothschild Prize in Physical Sciences, and the Gunnar Randers Research Prize, awarded every other year by the King of Norway.
Thierry Giamarchi is a French physicist.
Igor Ekhielevich Dzyaloshinskii, was a Russian theoretical physicist, known for his research on "magnetism, multiferroics, one-dimensional conductors, liquid crystals, van der Waals forces, and applications of methods of quantum field theory". In particular he is known for the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction.
Jeremy Levy is an American physicist who is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh.
Elbio Rubén Dagotto is an Argentinian-American theoretical physicist and academic. He is a distinguished professor in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Distinguished Scientist in the Materials Science and Technology Division at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Je-Geun Park is a physicist in the Republic of Korea. He is a condensed matter physicist known for his work on wide-ranging problems of magnetism, in particular strongly correlated electron systems. He is credited with discovering a new class of magnetic 2D materials, also known as van der Waals magnets. He has worked as a professor at Seoul National University.
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