Dr. Felix Flicker - Magnetic Monopoles in Spin Ice

Dr. Felix Flicker - Magnetic Monopoles in Spin Ice
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Abstract:

Join us on an expedition to find the north pole! The last century saw teams of explorers from around the world brave the ices in attempts to reach the north and south poles. These days we are again working to discover the poles -- but this time, the task is to isolate the individual poles of a magnet.

Cutting a magnet in half simply results in two smaller magnets, each with a north and south pole. There are deep reasons to expect the existence of `magnetic monopoles' (a north pole without a south, or vice versa). While there exist electrically-charged particles -- electric monopoles, such as the electron -- searches for magnetically-charged particles have so far proven fruitless.

Magnetic monopoles have, however, been predicted to appear as emergent properties of the “spin ices”, crystals of certain materials cooled to around 1 Kelvin. Experimental confirmation of these ideas could lead to fundamental advances in electronics, such as magnetic currents (“magnetricity”), and perhaps even the circumvention of impending physical limits on Moore's law.

Explorers once took to the ices in search of the Earth's poles. In this talk I will discuss recent attempts by teams around the world to find isolated magnetic poles in the spin ices. I will present recent work in which we found good evidence of their existence by listening to the noise of the crystals' magnetic fields using a highly sensitive magnetic field detector.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Felix Flicker is a theoretical physicist and Senior Lecturer in Physics at Bristol University. His work concerns the theory of quantum matter, and he tends to work on phenomena which involve interesting shapes and patterns (geometry and topology).

Until 2023 Felix was a Lecturer in Physics at Cardiff University. Before that, he held the Astor Junior Research Fellowship at New College, Oxford, and a Lindermann Trust Fellowship of the English Speaking Union, which sent him to the University of California, Berkeley. He completed his PhD at the University of Bristol. He was on the Perimeter Institute’s Perimeter Scholars International programme, and was an undergraduate at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford.
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