News

🎉 Congratulations to Dr. Alexander Mook and Prof. Dr. Jairo Sinova on the launch of their flagship excellence project PhonoIQ: Phonon Interactions and Quantum Geometry!
This project aims to explore and control magnets with unconventional magnetic order, going beyond the familiar categories of ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism. It focuses on the dynamic behavior of the lattice - the network of atoms in a material - which has traditionally been viewed as merely absorbing angular momentum. However, recent discoveries in topologically driven phenomena have revealed that the lattice plays a more active and emergent role, interacting closely with the electrons and magnetic order. The research will investigate how the quantum geometrical features of electron-phonon and spin-phonon interactions give rise to unconventional magnetism, transfer angular momentum to lattice vibrations, and influence the lifetimes of magnons (magnetic excitations). This deeper understanding could open up new ways to control magnetic properties at the quantum level. 🌟

#QuantumPhysics #ExcellenceProject #CondensedMatter #PhonoIQ

We are proud to announce that the recent publication of the Kläui lab group, “Gesture recognition with Brownian reservoir computing using geometrically confined skyrmion dynamics,” has been selected as one of the Top 50 best papers recently published in Physical Sciences Research – „Devices“ and is featured in the Editors‘ Highlights of Nature Communications. This work explores innovative methods for gesture recognition, utilizing Brownian reservoir computing and the dynamics of geometrically confined skyrmions, offering promising applications in future sensor and robotics technology.

📄 Read the article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52345-y
👉 Editors‘ Highlights: https://www.nature.com/ncomms/editorshighlights
📸 Fig. 1: Schematic representation of the dynamic Brownian reservoir computer

Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz will continue to be supported by the Research Initiative of the state as finalized by the signing the research initiative's target agreement with the Rhineland-Palatinate Ministry of Science and Health (MWG) on 6 May 2024.

As part of the continuing effort to focus on the most promising research activities, TopDyn has been chosen as one of 6 Top-Level Research Areas that will be funded until 2028.
The JGU Top-Level Research Areas have been identified as they bring together internationally established working groups that have already produced excellent results.

More information: https://presse.uni-mainz.de/johannes-gutenberg-universitaet-mainz-schaerft-forschungsprofil-weiter/

The Excellence Project TopDyn calls for research proposals to explore new research
directions that prepare future coordinated research programs.

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The Transregional Collaborative Research Center “Spin+X – spin in its collective environment” was first approved in 2016. It is currently in its second funding period and the third funding period will start in January 2024.

A research team of physicists and chemists from RPTU Kaiserlautern and JGU Mainz is working on fundamental spin phenomena. As in the first eight years, the work will focus on spin research and its potential for information and communiction technology. In addition to ferromagnets and antiferromagnets, a future focus will be on altermagnet based systems - new types of magnets that combine the best properties of ferromagnets and antiferromagnets. Findings from spin research are already being incorporated into the development of new technologies such as magnetic memory chips, logic and sensors.

TopDyn congratulates Dr. Libor Šmejkal on winning the "Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year 2023" award in the field of Natural Sciences.

Dr. Libor Šmejkal is a research team leader in the ISPIRE group at the Institute of Physics, JGU Mainz, and an associate researcher at the Insitute of Physics, Czech Academy of Sciences.

He is currently receiving Early Career Researcher Excellence Support from TopDyn for his project: " Altermagnetic spin exchange, excitations and dynamics (ALTERSEED)".

Dr Shane Kelly and J-Prof. Dr. J. Marino have recently published two articles (one on PRL and one on SciPost) on hybrid quantum circuits, which have received support from TopDyn over the last two years. The works aim at proposing new quantum error correction strategies in hybrid classical-quantum algorithms that are the research frontier in many body quantum information in the NISQ era. The two works features prestigious collaborations with the University of Berkeley and the KITP in Santa Barbara, California.

In one of the articles the NEUQUAM team have joined efforts with the trapped ions lab in Mainz (Dr. Poschinger and Prof. Dr. Schmidt-Kaler), re-creating a long missing link between theory and experiments in the area of quantum many body info in Mainz.

Orbitronics is an emerging field of research dealing with manipulation of the orbital degree of freedom of electrons for quantum information technology. However, unambiguously detecting ultrafast dynamics of orbital angular momentum has been challenging so far. By using state-of-the-art THz spectroscopy and theoretical calculations, scientists from Freie Universität Berlin and University of Mainz, together with collaborators, clarified ultrafast and long-range flow of orbitally polarized electron for the first time. The research is published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Publication:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-023-01470-8

We are very pleased to welcome PD Dr. Timo Kuschel as our new Lecturer and Scientific Coordinator to the TopDyn-Team.

We are looking forward to a successful cooperation.

We congratulate Dr. Benjamin Stadtmüller for his new position as Professor for Ultrafast Phenomena at Surfaces at RPTU and thank him for his great commitment as scientific coordinator of the TopDyn project and the good cooperation during the last 2 years.
We wish him all the best for the future and look forward to his contributions to TopDyn in the future!