Coming Visitors and Research Stays:

Research Scientist

Research area: Theory of Electronic Properties at the Nanoscale

Academic Affiliation: Centro De Fisica De Materiales

Period of Stay: October 1-31 2017

Research area: Applying and developing SPM tools for challenging questions of fundamental research in this field investigating e.g. metalsemiconductor interfaces, transport in graphene, charge dynamics of single dopants in GaAs, Kondo effect and material classes like pnictides, hexaborides and iridates.

Academic Affiliation: Universität Göttingen

Period of Stay: October 1 – December 31, 2018

Affiliation: Centro de Física de Materiales (CSIC-UPV/EHU)

Period of Stay: September 1 ~ September 30

Research Field: Nanomagnetism combined with superconductivity

Affiliation: ALBA Synchrotron Light Source, Barcelona, Spain

Research Field: Electronic and magnetic ground state of spin-orbit active transition metal compounds using x-ray spectroscopy (XAS, XMCD, RIXS)

Academic Affiliation: The Ohio State University

Research Area: Low-Temperature Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

Period of Stay: December 9 – 21, 2019

During the stay Mr. Repicky will give a talk in our center:

Date and Location: December 18th, 2019 / Saturn Seminar Room

Magnetic Textures in Chiral Magnet MnGe Observed with SP-STM

Materials with non-centrosymmetric crystal structures can host chiral spin states including magnetic skyrmions. Bulk MnGe hosts a short period magnetic state (3 nm), whose structure depends strongly on atomic lattice strain, and shows a large emergent transport signature associated with the skyrmion phase. Here, we use low-temperature (5 K) spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy (SP-STM) to image the magnetic textures in MnGe thin films grown via molecular beam epitaxy and study the influence of the surface on those textures. Most microscopic locations show a spin spiral phase with a 6-8 nm period and a propagation direction that is influenced by step edges, surface termination, and strain. We also report the presence of isolated target skyrmions that likely form due to local modulations in the atomic structure. The skyrmions have a triangular shape which appears to be set by the in-plane lattice vectors, and a core size of approximately 15 nm. We observe the target state is significantly more sensitive to magnetic fields than the spiral phase, and that local voltage and current pulses with the STM tip imply the texture can be ‘switched’ between states with different topological charge. To fully understand the magnetic textures in MnGe we will expand this study by investigating films of different thicknesses to vary the magnetic anisotropy.

Academic Affiliation: Research Center Jülich, Germany

Research Area: Understing fundamental properties on the nanoscale with the focus on magnetic excitations and correlated systems.

Research stay period: February 09 – 22, 2020

During the visit Prof. Ternes will give three talks in our Center.