Thin Films & Physics of Nanos­truc­tures - Re­search

My field of re­search is the ad­vanced tech­niques of trans­mis­sion elec­tron mi­croscopy, which make it pos­si­ble to ex­plore in­tri­cate de­tails on the nanoscale. The pos­si­bil­ity of using mod­ern elec­tron mi­croscopy tech­niques to de­ci­pher the in­ter­play be­tween the mi­crostruc­ture and the mag­netic prop­er­ties of ma­te­ri­als is fas­ci­nat­ing and im­por­tant for un­der­stand­ing and fur­ther im­prov­ing, for ex­am­ple, spin-​dependent elec­tronic trans­port in thin films and nanos­truc­tures. One of my cur­rent top­ics is the in­ves­ti­ga­tion of the mi­crostruc­ture in stress-​coupled thin film sys­tems, es­pe­cially in com­bi­na­tion with marten­sitic phase tran­si­tions. In an­other project, we are ex­ploit­ing the po­ten­tial of com­bin­ing mag­netic imag­ing and mi­cro­mag­netic sim­u­la­tions to de­ci­pher the switch­ing be­hav­iour of nanos­truc­tured mag­ne­tore­sis­tance sen­sors. In order to ob­tain the most com­pre­hen­sive pic­ture pos­si­ble, we com­bine the data from high-​resolution TEM imag­ing with energy-​dispersive X-ray spec­troscopy (EDX) and/or elec­tron en­ergy loss spec­troscopy (EELS/EFTEM) to de­ter­mine the el­e­men­tal com­po­si­tion, chi­ral elec­tron en­ergy loss dichro­ism (EMCD) for element-​specific mea­sure­ment of mag­netic mo­ments, dif­fer­en­tial phase con­trast (DPC) for map­ping the mag­netic or elec­tronic land­scape of the sam­ple and Lorentz mi­croscopy for imag­ing of the do­main walls and other state-​of-the-art TEM-​based tech­niques.

Please, do not hes­i­tate to con­tact me (ennen@physik.uni-​bielefeld.de) for fur­ther in­for­ma­tion.