Date: Thursday, December 19, 2019
Time: 1:30 PM
Talk Title: Hidden, Entangled and Resonating Order
Location: Chemla Room (67-3111)
Abstract:
The concept of magnetic dipolar order — for example ferro, ferri or antiferromagnetic — is at the core of our understanding of the behavior of magnetic materials, and is invaluable in selecting and tailoring them for applications. Sometimes, however, magnetic materials behave in ways that can not be captured within our established paradigms, suggesting additional kinds of order that are not yet identified. The indicators and implications of such “hidden order” are the subject of this talk. Using multiferroic composite order consisting of coupled electric and magnetic dipoles as a model, I will first discuss hints of static hidden order in existing materials, the intriguing behaviors that such hidden order causes, and experimental efforts that could unambiguously reveal it. Next, I will describe new physics that can emerge when the order is explicitly quantum mechanical, specifically the occurrence and signatures of multiferroic quantum criticality. Finally, I will explore dynamical order, in which thermal effects or an external drive cause a time evolution of the coupled quantum mechanical wavefunctions. I will outline promising future directions in the effort to unearth, explain and exploit these hidden, entangled and resonating orders, which will doubtless keep us entertained for many years to come.
Biography:
Dr. Nicola Spaldin is a Professor of Materials Theory in the Department of Materials at ETH Zürich.
She studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University, where she obtained a B.A. in Natural Sciences in 1991. She then moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned her PhD in Chemistry in 1996. She next worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Applied Physics Department at Yale University, before moving back to California, where she was Assistant Professor (1997-2002), Associate Professor (2002-2006) then Full Professor (2006 – 2010) in UC Santa Barbara’s Materials Department. She moved to ETH in 2011.
Spaldin has been a visiting professor at several institutions: Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore, India (2000), Department of Earth Sciences, Cambridge University, UK (2003), Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA (2007) and the Materials Theory Division at Uppsala University (2010).
