Thin Films & Physics of Nanos­truc­tures - Re­search

Our re­search aims at un­der­stand­ing the cou­pling be­tween dif­fer­ent de­grees of free­dom which give rise to phe­nom­ena such as the caloric and mul­ticaloric ef­fects, mag­ne­tore­sis­tance, shape mem­ory, etc, with the ul­ti­mate goal of en­gi­neer­ing novel func­tional mag­netic ma­te­ri­als.

Caloric ef­fects have an enor­mous po­ten­tial for ap­pli­ca­tions in room-​temperature cool­ing due to the higher ef­fi­ciency and en­vi­ron­men­tally friend­li­ness. For ex­am­ple, mag­ne­tocaloric ma­te­ri­als are con­sid­ered as the most promis­ing can­di­dates for re­plac­ing the cur­rently pre­dom­i­nant vapor compression-​based cool­ing tech­nol­ogy.

How­ever the physics be­hind the phe­nom­ena giv­ing rise to these ef­fects is poorly un­der­stood and the de­vel­op­ment of novel ma­te­ri­als still re­lies on a trial and error ap­proach. There­fore, in order to de­velop new and more ef­fi­cient ma­te­ri­als, fun­da­men­tal un­der­stand­ing of the in­ter­play be­tween dif­fer­ent de­grees of free­dom which give rise to phase tran­si­tions and the as­so­ci­ated caloric ef­fects needs to be gained in a fun­da­men­tal level. Our ob­jec­tive is to probe ma­te­ri­als pre­sent­ing caloric ef­fects in order to un­der­stand what makes these ma­te­ri­als tick with the ul­ti­mate goal of mak­ing it pos­si­ble to de­velop im­proved ma­te­ri­als for ap­pli­ca­tions.

Our "tool­box" in­cludes:
- a num­ber of syn­the­sis tech­niques such as arc melt­ing, ball milling, thin film growth, etc.;
- Var­i­ous X-​rays and neu­tron scat­ter­ing tech­niques which allow us to fol­low the mag­netic and struc­tural evo­lu­tion of caloric sys­tems;
- pres­sure, tem­per­a­ture and mag­netic field de­pen­dent mea­sure­ments make it pos­si­ble to trig­ger and fol­low phase tran­si­tions under the in­flu­ence of dif­fer­ent stim­uli;
- in-​field dif­fer­en­tial scan­ning calorime­try;
- high res­o­lu­tion trans­mis­sion elec­tron mi­croscopy;

We are al­ways open to col­lab­o­ra­tions and we are al­ways keen on hav­ing tal­ented sci­en­tists join­ing our group.
Please con­tact us with any ques­tions you have.