Promoscience

Recent theoretical predictions and experimental realizations of exotic quasi-particles and topological excitations in condensed matter, such as Dirac and Weyl fermions in topological semimetals, magnetic monopoles in spin ice, and fractionalised excitations in quantum spin liquid, have led to tremendous research interests in emergent quantum materials. As a unique microscopic probe, neutron scattering is ideally suited for the studies of static and dynamic magnetic correlations in these materials. This can be demonstrated by the recent work carried out in the group led by the main supervisor at MLZ [1-10]. The overarching theme of the proposed topic is to use advanced neutron scattering techniques, including single-crystal neutron diffraction, inelastic neutron scattering and polarised neutron scattering, to investigate magnetic order and collective excitations in emergent quantum materials, such as magnetic kagome semimetals, kagome superconductors, quantum spin ice, quantum spin liquid and Kitaev materials. High-quality single crystals of various emergent quantum materials have been successfully grown in the group, which can be used for this topic. In addition to the on-site research at MLZ, frequent travels for beamtime at other large-scale facilities including neutron, synchrotron radiation and muon, would form an integral part of this topic. We therefore seek highly motivated young researchers to work on one of the following projects,

• Magnetic diffuse scattering and fractionalised excitations in highly frustrated magnets
• Magnetic order and excitations in magnetic topological quantum materials
• Neutron scattering on 2D van der Waals magnetic materials
• Single-crystal growth and neutron scattering studies of quantum materials
• Instrumentation and software developments for quantum material research, e.g., the major DNS upgrade project, further software developments for the simulations of polarised magnetic diffuse scattering and inelastic neutron scattering, etc.

[1] V. Pecanha-Antonio, et al., Phys. Rev. B 96, 214415 (2017); [2] V. Pecanha-Antonio, et al. Phys. Rev. B 99, 134415 (2019); [3] F. Zhu, et al., Phys. Rev. Research 2, 043100 (2020); [4] F. Zhu, et al., Sci. Adv. 7, eabi7532 (2021); [5] L.C. Zhang, et al., Phys. Rev. B 103, 134414 (2021); [6] X. Mi, et al., Phys. Rev. B 103, 174413 (2021); [7] K.X. Zhang, et al., ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 13, 20788 (2021); [8] W. Jin, et al., Phys. Rev. B 105, L180504 (2022); [9] X. Wang, et al., arXiv: 2304.00632 (2023); [10] X. Wang, et al., arXiv: 2306.04312 (2023).