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Nicola Spaldin
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Nicola Ann Spaldin (born 1969)[5][1] FRS is professor of materials science at ETH Zurich, known for her pioneering research on multiferroics.[6][4][7][8][9][10]
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Education and early life
A native of Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, England, Spaldin earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in natural sciences from the University of Cambridge in 1991, and a PhD in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996.[11][12]
Career and research
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Perspective
Spaldin was inspired to search for multiferroics, magnetic ferroelectric materials, by a remark about potential collaboration made by a colleague studying ferroelectrics during her postdoctoral research studying magnetic phenomena at Yale University from 1996 to 1997.[13] She continued to develop the theory of these materials as a new faculty member at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and in 2000 published (under her previous name, Hill) "a seminal article"[14] that for the first time explained why few such materials were known.[15] Following her theoretical predictions, in 2003 she was part of a team that experimentally demonstrated the multiferroic properties of bismuth ferrite, BiFeO3.[16] Over the next years she was involved in a number of developments in the rapidly emerging field of multiferroics, including the first demonstration of electric-field control of magnetism in BiFeO3[17] (selected by Science magazine as one of their "Areas to watch" in their 2007 Breakthroughs of the Year section), the discovery of conducting ferroelectric domain walls[18] and a strain-driven morphotropic phase boundary,[19] again in BiFeO3, and the identification of new mechanisms for multiferroicity, for example the improper geometric ferroelectricity in YMnO3.[20] In the same time period, she developed and implemented methodology to allow application of finite electric and magnetic fields to metal-insulator heterostructures within the density functional theory formalism,[21] allowing her to solve the long-standing problem of the origin of the dielectric dead layer in capacitors[22] and to identify previously unknown routes to magnetoelectric coupling.[23]
Spaldin moved from UCSB to ETH Zurich in 2010.[12] Since then, three particular new directions stand out in her research portfolio. One is the development of the concept and formalism of magnetic multipoles, which require a theory of magnetism beyond the usual magnetic-dipole level. In addition to their importance for magnetoelectric coupling,[24] these have proved relevant for understanding the occurrence of magnetism at the surfaces of compensated antiferromagnets[25] as well as for characterizing phenomena as diverse as altermagnetism[26] and magnetic skyrmions.[27] Second, the establishment of Dynamical Multiferroicity,[28] which spawned interest in so-called chiral phonons and their associated magnetic moments.[29] And third, the unexpected application of multiferroics in other more fundamental branches of physics: She designed a new multiferroic with the precise specifications required to allow a solid-state search for the electric dipole moment of the electron[30] and identified a multiferroic with a symmetry-lowering phase trainsition that generates the crystallographic equivalent of cosmic strings.[31] These "cross-over" projects led to a current interest in dark-matter direct detection.
Her publications are listed on Google scholar.[4]
Awards and honours
Spaldin was the 2010 winner of the American Physical Society's James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials,[32] the winner of the Rössler Prize of the ETH Zurich Foundation in 2012,[33] the 2015 winner of the Körber European Science Prize for "laying the theoretical foundation for the new family of multiferroic materials"[16][12][14] and one of the laureates of the 2017 L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science.[34] In November 2017 she was awarded the Lise-Meitner Lectureship of the Austrian and German Physical Societies in Vienna[35][36] and in 2019 she won the Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist.[2][37] In 2021 she received the IUPAP Magnetism Award and Néel Medal,[38] and in 2022 the Europhysics Prize of the European Physical Society[39] and the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics.[40] In 2023, she won the Gothenburg Lise Meitner Award.[41]
Spaldin is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (2008), the Materials Research Society (2011), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2013)[12] and the Royal Society (2017),[42] an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and a member of Academia Europaea (2021)[43] and the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (2021).[44] She is a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Engineering (2019),[45] the French Academy of Sciences (2021), the Austrian Academy of Sciences (2022) and the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina (2022).[46] She is an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society[47] and a Fellow-Ambassadeur of the CNRS.[48]
Service
Spaldin is a member of the ERC Scientific Council[49] and a founding Lead Editor of Physical Review Research.[50]
Teaching
Spaldin has twice received the ETH Golden Owl for Teaching Excellence[51] as well as the ETH Award for Best Teaching.[52] Some of her lectures are available on her youtube channel.[53] She coordinated the revision of her Department's BSc Curriculum in Materials and documented it in a blog. Her textbook on Magnetic Materials is published by Cambridge University Press.[54]
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References
External links
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