Chiara Ciccarelli was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship from October 2017. Chiara will take the Fellowship in Cambridge where she is currently building an optical/THz pump-probe setup to study the interaction between spin currents and magnons (magnetic excitations) in antiferromagnets.
Chiara’s research until now focussed on studying new relativistic effects in condensed matter by which the magnetic state of a ferromagnet can be switched and read via electrical currents. This is important for developing efficient magnetic random access memories that combine low power consumption with the speed of a DRAM. Achieving the electrical writing and readout in an antiferromagnet by the same relativistic phenomena would constitute an incremental advancement in this context. Spin dynamics in antiferromagnets are orders of magntitude faster than in ferromagnets, which would lead to faster-than-ever data storage technologies.