Non-equilibrium superconductivity and spintronics

Dr Jagadeesh Moodera is a senior research scientist and group leader at the physics department at MIT, USA. Jagadeesh is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the IQC, University of Waterloo; a Visiting Professor at the Applied Physics Department, Technical University of Eindhoven; a Distinguished Institute Professor at IIT Madras; and a Distinguished Foreign Scientist at NPL, Delhi. Jagadeesh has served on the Board of External Experts for national research programs in France, Holland, England and Ireland and has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He is also the recipient of several awards: IBM and TDK Research Awards, and the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize from the American Physical Society. Jagadeesh’s research interest lies in: 1) manipulating electron spin in solids-spin tunnelling, spin filtering and interfacial exchange coupling; 2) molecular spintronics: towards molecular-scale spin memory; 3) ferromagnet/superconductor heterostructure towards superconducting spintronics; 4) quantum transport in topological driven systems and heterostructures: atomic scale interface exchange phenomena; atomically resolved interface chemical/physical/magnetic studies; electrical transport; and 5) the search for Majorana bound states in unconventional superconductors, and interactions.

Cecilia Holmqvist is a postdoctoral research fellow at Linnaeus University, Sweden. She received her PhD at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and subsequently was a postdoc at Konstanz University, Germany, and at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway. Her research interests include non-equilibrium charge and spin transport as well as noise in superconducting hybrid structures, in particular how Andreev states may interact with the dynamics of a nanomagnet. Her research interests also include spin-orbit torques and magnetisation dynamics generated by materials with strong spin-orbit coupling such as normal metals and topological insulators, and spin transport carried by classical spin-wave dynamics, such as spin superfluidity, in ferromagnets and antiferromagnets.

Alexander Buzdin is a full professor at the University of Bordeaux in France; since 2004 he has been a senior member of the prestigious Institut  Universitaire de France, where he holds  the Chair “Physics of Superconductivity”. This year Alexander is the Liverhulme Trust professor at the Material Science Department of Cambridge University. Alexander graduated from Moscow State University and then habilitated in 1986. He worked under the supervision of the Nobel Prize winner Alexey Abrikosov at the Institute for High Pressure Physics of Russian Academy of Science and Argonne National Laboratory. Alexander is the author of more than 250 articles on superconductivity, magnetism and nanophysics. He received the Holweck Medal and Prize in 2013, a joint award by the UK Institute of Physics and the French Physical Society, for his pioneering theoretical studies of superconductor–ferromagnet multilayer systems.

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Jacob Linder is a professor of physics at the Center of Excellence QuSpin, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He has taught several courses in quantum physics, particle physics, electromagnetism, and classical mechanics. His main research interests lie within the quantum physics of condensed matter, with particular emphasis on magnetic materials, superconducting materials, and Dirac materials. He has co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in internationally reputable journals such as Physical Review and the Nature family of journals. He lives in Trondheim (Norway) with his wife and two daughters.

Dr Emilie Jué is a research associate in the National Institute of Standards and Technologies within the Spintronics Group. She graduated with a PhD in Physics from the University of Grenoble in 2013 where she studied the current induced domain wall motion in ultrathin materials with high spin-orbit coupling. Her current research interests include spin-orbit torques and spin-torque oscillators. She is an active member of the IEEE society.  She has authored and co-authored 10 peer reviewed publications that have been cited over 1000 times.

After her PhD in 2012, Dr Chiara Ciccarelli got a Junior Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge. In 2016 she was awarded a Winton Advanced Research Fellowship by the Cavendish Laboratory and since 2017 she has been a Royal Society University Research Fellow, running her own group on spintronics.

Machiel Flokstra is a lead researcher in the Superconductivity and Magnetism group at the University of St Andrews. Machiel’s research interest is focused on exploring the complex interplay between conventional superconductivity and ferromagnetism using a variety of unique measurement techniques, in particular low-energy muon-spin spectroscopy. He did his PhD at Leiden University, under the supervision of Jan Aarts, on proximity effects in superconducting spin-valve structures.

Sebastian Bergeret is the head of the Mesoscopic Physics Group at the Material Physics Center in San Sebastian, Spain. His research field is the theoretical study of transport properties of nanostructures, focusing mainly on superconducting systems. Sebastian’s works provided significant insights on superconductivity in hybrid systems and has led to verifiable predictions. In particular, his works on odd-triplet superconductivity, and more recently on non-equilibrium and spin-orbit coupling in superconductors has sparked an intense research activity in the field and opened the door for spin-based applications of superconducting devices.

Detlef Beckmann obtained his PhD in Karlsruhe in 1997 on Fermi surface studies of organic superconductors. Since 1999, he has been a staff scientist at the Institute of Nanotechnology of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where he has worked on molecular electronics, mesoscopic physics and superconductor-ferromagnet hybrid structures. In these structures, the competition of magnetism and superconductivity leads to new transport phenomena such as nonlocal Andreev reflection and triplet supercurrents. Recently, his work has been focussed on nonequilibrium transport in high-field superconductors, where coupled spin and heat transport leads to very long spin relaxation times and large thermoelectric phenomena.

Adam Monier is a marine microbiologist interested in the ecology and evolution of microbial eukaryotes and associated viruses, and their interplay in oceans. Adam received his MSc and PhD in Bioinformatics from Aix-Marseille Université, France, followed by postdoctoral research in the labs of Professor Alexandra Z Worden (MBARI, CA, USA) and Professor Connie Lovejoy (Université Laval, QC, Canada). In 2014, Adam was awarded a Royal Society Newton Fellowship to work with Professor Tom Richards, at the University of Exeter, on the impact of horizontal gene transfer events in phytoplankton-virus interactions. Since 2018, he has been a Senior Research Fellow and a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the Living Systems Institute (University of Exeter) where his group uses ‘omics’ tools to determine the influence of viral infection on phytoplankton physiology, and its repercussions on marine ecosystems.

Irina Bobkova graduated from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 2001 and received her PhD in condensed matter physics from the Institute of Solid State Physics in 2004. Now she is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Solid State Physics of RAS. Her research interests with published research are in the field of coexistence of superconductivity and magnetism, proximity effects at nanoscale, nonequilibrium superconductivity and low-dissipation spintronics. Also, she is a lecturer at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. She teaches courses on electron interactions in metals for master students and on the introduction to group theory for undergraduate students.

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Norman Birge received his PhD in 1986 from the University of Chicago, studying the glass transition in supercooled liquids. He changed his focus to electronic transport during his post-doctoral work at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He came to Michigan State University in 1988 and has been there ever since, aside from two sabbatical years with the Groupe Quantronique at the CEA Saclay in France. His research has spanned several topics in quantum transport and mesoscopic physics, including 1/f noise and universal conductance fluctuations, dissipative quantum tunneling of defects in metals, electron phase coherence at very low temperatures, the superconducting proximity effect, and nonequilibrium phenomena in metallic systems. His current research focuses on the interplay between superconductivity and ferromagnetism in hybrid structures.

Professor Takashi Kimura has been a Professor in the Physics Department at Kyushu University since 2013. From 2009 to 2013, Takashi was a Professor in Inamori Frontier Center at Kyushu University. Between 2004 and 2008, he was an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Physics at University of Tokyo. From 2002 to 2004, Takashi was a researcher in Riken Frontier System. Takaski received his PhD in Engineering from Osaka University in 2002.

Oleg A Mukhanov is Chief Technology Officer at HYPRES, which he joined in 1991 to initiate the development of Rapid Single Flux Quantum (RSFQ) superconductor circuit technology. He obtained his PhD in physics from Moscow State University in 1987 and an MS in electrical engineering (with honors) from Moscow Engineering Physics Institute in 1983. Prior to Hypres, he was a staff scientist in Moscow State University where he co-invented RSFQ technology. At Hypres, Dr Mukhanov has initiated and led many projects on high-performance digital and mixed signal RSFQ circuits for variety of applications including data and signal processors, analog and time to digital converters, which resulted in the first commercial use of superconducting digital electronics – RSFQ-based Digital-RF receivers. Dr Mukhanov authored and co-authored over 170 scientific papers, book chapters and over 20 patents. Dr Mukhanov is a Fellow of IEEE and recipient of The IEEE Award for Continuing and Significant Contributions in the Field of Small Scale Applied Superconductivity.