Meet us at the APS March Meeting

Hadn’t it been cancelled you could have met us at the APS march meeting in Denver and learned more about our research. Members of the group had the following contributions:

New paper: Manipulating magnetic order in FeTe

Our paper on imaging and manipulating magnetic order of FeTe in vector magnetic fields has appeared in Science Advances, see https://goo.gl/8f2v9c. It shows how we can use spin-polarized STM not only to investigate surface magnetic order, but also to manipulate it.

See also Christopher Trainer’s talk at the APS March meeting on this, on Monday, March 4 at 3.54pm (Talk C06:8).

Other talks by the group include talks on Quasiparticle Interference on minerals (by Carolina De Almeida Marques, talk A33.3 (Monday 8.24am) and on a strain-stabilized charge density wave in LiFeAs by Chi-Ming Yim, talk A10.4 (Monday 9.00am).

Save the date: CMQM Meeting 2019

We will host the CMQM (Condensed Matter and Quantum Materials) meeting 2019 at the School of Physics and Astronomy, organized by the IOP. Through the CMQM conference we wish to provide a forum for the wider UK Condensed Matter Physics community to meet for discussions and to present their research across the specialised disciplines. The conference is supported by a wide range of relevant Institute of Physics groups and we envision it to be the first of an annual series, which we hope will rapidly become established as a platform for the community to come together in the spirit of the former CMMP meetings.

The meeting will take place 3-5 July 2019 in St Andrews, featuring plenary talks by Jacqueline Bloch, Andre Geim, Laura Heyderman, Steve Simon, and Julie Staunton, invited talks in specialized sessions and a poster session.

Highlight: Strain-stabilization of a new smectic order

Our recent paper on the Discovery of a strain-stabilized smectic electronic order in LiFeAs is an Editors’ highlight in Nature Communications. Our work combines atomic-scale imaging by low temperature scanning tunneling microscopy with uniaxial strain. Straining the iron-based superconductor LiFeAs reveals the emergence of a new modulated phase, representative of a smectic electronic order. Tunneling spectra of the superconducting gap in this phase show a substantially modified superconducting order parameter.
Our results highlight the importance of electron-lattice coupling in the iron-based superconductor LiFeAs.

Read more in our article in Nature Communications.

PhD positions available

The 2019 recruitment round for PhD positions has started!

PhD positions are available through a number of routes, including through the School of Physics and Astronomy and the International Max Planck Research School.
Our group works on development of cutting edge instrumentation for atomic scale studies of electronic structure, complex magnetic orders and unconventional superconductivity. The experiments are undertaken in ultra-low vibration labs.