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/ Events

Emergent magnetic monopoles in frustrated magnetic systems

17 - 18 October 2011 09:00 - 18:00

Organised by Dr Will Branford, Professor Steven Bramwell, Professor Tom Kibble FRS CBE and Dr Tom Fennell

Recent advances show that magnetic monopoles emerge in spin ice. This opens up new fields of study such as “magnetricity”, testing magnetic topological (including cosmological) system theories and the realisation of equivalent topological defects in “artificial spin ice” nanostructures, with prospective application in evolvable neural network hardware. Related topics on Berry phase physics and domain wall motion will be discussed.

Biographies of the organisers and speakers are available below. Audio recordings are freely available and the programme can be downloaded here. Papers have been been published in an issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.

Organisers

  • Dr Will Branford, Imperial College London, UK

    Dr Will Branford is a lecturer in experimental solid-state physics and an EPSRC Career Advancement Fellow at Imperial College London. He obtained his PhD from the Royal Institution of Great Britain and UCL in 2001 and was awarded a Ramsay Memorial Fellowship at UCL in 2004. His research focuses on the interplay between the structure and topology of materials and their magnetic and transport properties. In particular he has a longstanding interest in spin dependent effects in the electrical transport of materials, including magnetoresistance and the anomalous and topological Hall effects. He is currently investigating magnetic charge transport and monopole defect formation in frustrated magnetic nanostructures known as artificial spin ices. 

  • Professor Steven Bramwell, UCL, UK

    Steve Bramwell graduated from Oxford with a degree in Chemistry in 1984, then held positions in Oxford and Grenoble, before joining UCL in 1997. Formerly a Professor of Physical Chemistry, he is now in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCL. Alongside his 1997 discovery and naming of spin ice (with MJ Harris), he is known for his calculation of β = 0.23, a key critical exponent for magnetic films (with PCW Holdsworth, 1993) and a probability distribution named after him (the Bramwell-Holdsworth-Pinton Distribution, 1998). He was awarded the 2010 Holweck Prize of the British Institute of Physics and the French Societe de Physique, to recognise his work on model magnets, and he was the co-recipient of the 2012 European Physical Society CMD Europhysics Prize for the discovery of magnetic monopoles in spin ice. His discovery of "magnetricity" in spin ice was recognised by the Times Higher Research project of the Year, 2010 and he appeared on The Times's 2010 list of the 100 most important UK scientists. He presented the 2012 Wohlfarth Lecture of the IOP.

  • Sir Tom Kibble CBE FRS, Imperial College London, UK

    Tom Kibble was educated in Edinburgh and joined the Theoretical Physics Group at Imperial College London led by Professor Abdus Salam in 1959. He became Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1970, and was Head of the Physics Department from 1983 to 1991. He retired in 1998 and is now Emeritus Professor and Distinguished Research Fellow. Tom’s research interests have been in quantum field theory, high-energy particle physics and cosmology, especially spontaneous symmetry breaking and topological defect formation. He is best known for work on the mechanism for giving mass to gauge bosons, and was one of the first proponents of the idea of cosmic strings which may have been formed in the very early Universe. Kibble was elected FRS in 1980 and knighted in 2014. Among numerous other awards, he has received Royal Medals from the Royal Societies of both London and Edinburgh.

  • Dr Tom Fennell, Paul Scherrer Institut, Switzerland

    Dr Tom Fennell studied Chemistry at the University of Southampton between 1996 and 1999 before completing his PhD at the Royal Institution/University College under the supervision of Professor Steve Bramwell.  During this time he began to work on spin ice using neutron scattering techniques.  Subsequently he has been a post-doc at the University of Waterloo, Canada with Professor Michel Gingras, also working on spin ice; at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility; and the London Centre for Nanotechnology, again working with Steve Bramwell on kagome ice and spin ice, as well as Des McMorrow and Andrew Wills on other frustrated magnets.  In 2008 he became co-responsible for the D7 polarized diffuse neutron scattering spectrometer at the ILL, leading to the observation of pinch point scattering in spin ice, confirming the prediction that it can be described as a Coulomb phase.  Since the start of 2011 he has been first responsible for D7 and continues to pursue research into correlations in frustrated systems.