Unveiling the Power of Flexoelectricity: A Breakthrough Research Project by Ambizione Awardee, Nikita Shepelin
The search for sustainable energy solutions is of utmost priority in modern society. Overcoming the challenges of energy conversion and storage is critical to reducing dependence on fossil fuels and harnessing renewable sources. Dielectric materials hold great promise for meeting these challenges, but current limitations prevent their widespread use.
IEEE Magnetics Society Early Career Award 2023
The IEEE Magnetics Society 2023 Early Career Award goes to Claire Donnelly, a former member of LMX and the Mesoscopic Systems Group, for her excellent work on developing x-ray techniques for imaging magnetic structures in three dimensions.
Appointment of Thomas Lippert as new head of the Laboratory for Multiscale Materials Experiments (LMX)
Starting 1. December 2022, Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Lippert will be the new head of the Laboratory for Multiscale Materials Experiments (LMX). He follows Prof. Dr. Laura Heyderman, our first laboratory head who successfully formed and established the LMX in the PSI landscape as a Centre of Materials.
TFI goes TecDays
In July 2022, two PhDs of our Thin Films and Interfaces (TFI) Group offered a practical teaching module to pupils at the Kantonsschule Stadelhofen as part of the Swiss TecDays. These are one-day events at Swiss grammar schools, organized by the Schweizerische Akademie der Technischen Wissenschaften (SATW), to support and strengthen technology education at schools. By bringing together pupils and experts from industry, universities, or research institutions, TecDays aims to raise an early awareness for technology and science.
Young Scientist Award 2020
The Young Scientist Award 2020 of the European Magnetism Association (EMA) goes to Claire Donnelly for advances in the experimental characterization of spin textures and their dynamics in three dimensions with X-ray techniques.
Claire Donnelly, a former Ph.D. and postdoc at PSI in the Mesoscopic Systems Group, is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. She received her PhD in 2017 from the ETH Zurich for her work on hard X-ray tomography of three-dimensional magnetic structures based at the Paul Scherrer Institute. Following a postdoc at the ETH Zurich, she moved to the University of Cambridge and the Cavendish in January 2019, where she is focusing on the dynamics of three-dimensional magnetic nanostructures.
Her research focuses on three dimensional magnetic systems, which she studies using sophisticated synchorotron X-rays to determine the three-dimensional magnetic configurations, and their dynamic behaviour, at the nanoscale.
TecDay: LMX meets Hohe Promenade
TecDay is an SATW initiative that was developed at the Kantonsschule Limmattal in 2007 and has since been rolled out to more than 60 secondary schools across Switzerland. By the end of 2017 it had reached around 45,000 students and 5,000 teachers. In December 2019 the LMX contributed in one module, that received a total of 16 students over the course of a morning. The module was organized in three different “stations”, each one focusing on one topic or area that the group is working on.
DGKK Award for young researchers 2019 for Pascal Puphal
Dr Pascal Puphal (currently a Postdoc at PSI, LMX, Solid State Chemistry Group) has recently been awarded with the DGKK young researcher price from the German Crystal Growth Community on his Ph.D. work performed in the group of Cornelius Krellner at the Geothe University Frankfurt am Main on the topic "Tuning two dimensional Cu-based quantum spin systems". The work covers the stabilization and proof of a 2D dimer structure by Sr substitution in Han Purple and the research of novel kagome materials of the prominent quantum spin liquid candidate herbertsmithite by the hydrothermal route.
Claire Donnelly dissertation research awards
In August 2018, Claire Donnelly was awarded the SPS Award in Computational Physics, sponsored by COMSOL, and the Werner Meyer-Ilse Memorial Award. We congratulate her on these awards as well as for the two awards received earlier this year: the ETH Medal for an outstanding doctoral thesis and the American Physical Society Richard L. Greene Dissertation Award, recognizing doctoral thesis research of exceptional quality and importance. These prizes are for her dissertation on “Hard X-ray Tomography of Three Dimensional Magnetic Structures”. Claire carried out her dissertation in the Laboratory for Mesoscopic Systems (ETH Zurich – Paul Scherrer Institute) in collaboration with the CXS group and the OMNY project, with experiments conducted at the cSAXS beamline, SLS, and Sebastian Gliga, a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Glasgow. She will continue this research at the University of Cambridge with a Leverhulme Fellowship supported by the Newton Trust. We wish her every success! - Picture courtesy of the APS.
