News

Thomas Gruner and colleagues in the QM group and at the MPI-CPfS in Dresden showed that YbNi2Sn retains high spin entropy down to very low temperatures, much less than 1K, despite being a good metal. On the face of it, this is unexpected, because electrons in metals form a degenerate Fermi gas, and so their entropy decreases linearly with temperatu…

A number of QM group members recently travelled to the American Physical Society March Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, along with over 11,000 other attendees. Talks by QM members spanned a range of topics from the electronic structure of Dirac nodal-line semimetals through to the high magnetic field phase landscape of uranium ditelluride.

The QM seminar series has picked up this term, with Clifford Hicks (Birmingham) giving a very interesting survey of recent developments in Sr2RuO4 in January, followed last week by Tamaghna Hazra (KIT Karlsruhe), who talked about upper limits on Tc imposed by phase fluctuations. Coming up: Alix McCollam (Cork) on 22 February and Greg Boebinger (Tal…

A collaboration led by Research Fellow Dr. Alex Eaton is making rapid progress with resolving the Fermi surface and carrier mass in the unconventional superconductor UTe2, providing key input to any comprehensive theoretical description. Results from a series of quantum oscillation measurements have now been published in Nature Communications. Alex…

Stephen Hodgson passed his PhD viva with minor corrections last week and was celebrated by a group outing on Friday - congratulations! We thank his examiners - external, Prof. Stefan Süllow (Brunswick/Germany) and Dr. Michael Sutherland (QM, Cavendish). Stephen brought high pressure heat capacity techniques to our group and used them to investigate…

Correlated electron materials display a zoo of ordered states such as multiple forms of magnetism and superconductivity, but the metallic 'normal' state from which these arise is itself in many cases only incompletely understood. One of the most fundamental examples of such a correlated normal state occurs as a Mott insulator is metallised by dopin…

Junior Research Fellow Dr. Alex Eaton with PhD students Theo Weinberger and Zheyu Wu have made rapid progress in their investigation of the new unconventional superconductor UTe2: in three papers submitted in quick succession to high-profile journals, they presenta convincing model for the Fermi surface geometry in UTe2 based on their recent quantu…

CeSb2 has the immense advantage that clean single crystals are fairly straightforward to grow. It is well-known and - at ambient pressure - has been studied in great detail. However, we found that it undergoes a Dr. Jekyll - Mr. Hyde structural transformation under moderate applied pressure, and in its high pressure structure displays entirely new …

Congratulations to Alex Hickey for passing his PhD viva on 31 March 2023. His thesis, intriguingly titled "Big data, bigger magnets, and tiny high-temperature superconducting cuprates", was examined by Prof. Louis Taillefer (Sherbrooke/Canada) and Dr. Michael Sutherland (QM, Cavendish). All the best for your next career step, Alex!

Over a three-week window in March, three independent Cavendish teams worked at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) at Tallahassee/Florida. The schedule was a little intense, but we managed to get together for a few hours on a Sunday afternoon (photo above). Experiments in fields of up to 45 Tesla and pressures up to 40 kbar ranged f…

As the year winds down, we got together for the traditional QM Christmas Dinner, hosted this time in the Old Kitchens at Trinity College. 

Significant EPSRC grant funding has been awarded just at the right time to support our projects on superconducting and anomalous normal states in correlated electron systems YFe2Ge2, LuFe2Ge2,  CeSb2, CeNi2Ge2 and in quasiperiodic materials such as high pressure Bi, Sb, and Ba. Superconductivity in YFe2Ge2, LuFe2Ge2 and CeSb2 was discovered over th…

For the first time in years, the school outreach activity Physics at Work was run properly in-person again this year, smoothly organised by Jacob Butler and his team 20-22 September.QM contributed with a presentation on superconductivity which the visiting students found so engaging that they awarded the shield for the most popular presentation to …

Well done to Sian’s student Nicola Kelly for passing her PhD viva in March 2022. Nicola’s thesis was on low-dimensional and frustrated magnetism in a range of different lanthanide ceramics. She has now moved to Oxford Chemistry as a postdoc in Simon Clarke’s group, where she is investigating transition-metal magnetism in layered mixed-anion materia…

Warmest congratulations to Alex Eaton, who has won a Junior Research Fellowship at Sidney Sussex College - well done! A member of Suchitra's group, Alex carried out high precision quantum oscillation measurements at high magnetic fields in FeSb2, which showed that this unusual narrow-gap semiconductor features a large Fermi surface in its insulatin…