Project Info
*Skyrmions in vdW materials
Serena Eley
serenaeley@mines.edu
Skyrmions are nanoscale whirlpools of magnetic moments that arise in certain magnetic materials due to interactions between neighboring atomic spins (spin-orbit coupling). Behaving as particles that can be controllably manipulated, skyrmions are potentially useful as information carriers in next-generation low-energy spintronic devices. Notably, they were recently observed in Fe3GeTe2 (FGT), a 2D van der Waals (vdW) ferromagnet. This is exciting because vdW materials are of interest for devices owing to their readily tunable electronic properties and for fundamental studies of low dimensional long-range magnetic order. The student involved in this project will fabricate Hall bars of FGT and perform magnetic force microscopy and electrical transport measurements on FGT devices to determine the conditions under which skyrmions form in FGT.
More Information:
Grand Challenge: Engineer the tools of scientific discovery
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.nanolett.9b03453
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7473669/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17566-x
Primary Contacts:
Myself
Graduate students
Student Preparation
Qualifications
Analog Electronics
Modern Physics
TIME COMMITMENT (HRS/WK)
5 hours/week
SKILLS/TECHNIQUES GAINED
Atomic force microscopy
Magnetic force microscopy
Low temperature measurement (down to 1.8 K)
Electrical transport measurement
Magnetization measurements
Nanofabrication
MENTORING PLAN
The student will attend weekly group meetings, communicate through Microsoft Teams, and can request regular (weekly), in-person individual meeting with faculty. For the first month, I will meet with the student in the lab on a weekly basis.
PREFERRED STUDENT STATUS
Junior
Senior