Shane McCartan

Shane joined the CDT in September 2016, having previously completed an MSci in Physics at Queen's University Belfast. In Semester 1 of 2016/17 he completed an exploratory research project at the University of Glasgow, supervised by Professor Marc Sorel - Improving the output efficiency of mid-infrared LEDs.

 

CDT PhD Project - Structure and Ferroic Ordering at Conducting Domain Walls

This project builds on one of the existing CDT projects, which aims to examine charged domain walls for spintronics applications in memory storage (click here for details).

This project will work with the magnetic oxides being created in the sister project to study the detail structure and ferroic orderings around domain walls of potential interest for such applications, principally using scanning transmission electron microscopy. This will be used to measure picometre displacements of atoms due to polarization, local magnetization using both conventional differential phase contrast and newly emerging electron magnetic circular dichroism techniques, and changes in electronic structure using electron energy loss spectroscopy. With recent advances in microscopy, external stimuli can be applied while studying such systems, such as in situ heating or electric fields. Information gathered from such techniques will be correlated with information determined using scanned probe microscopy on local polarization, magnetization and conductivity around domain walls. Furthermore, the structures studied in the research will be modelled using atomistic simulation techniques in collaboration with external partners in order to provide further insight into the meaning of the observations made in this research programme. The results of this project will provide the fundamental insights that allow progress to be made towards practical devices based on conductive domain walls in magnetic oxides.