skip to content

Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability

Department of Physics
 

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.

Latest news

Manipulation of Quantum Entangled Triplet Pairs

7 January 2021

Researchers have uncovered a new technique to create and manipulate pairs of particle-like excitations in organic semiconductors that carry non-classical spin information across space, much like the entangled photon pairs in the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Roden “paradox”.

Machine learning algorithm helps in the search for new drugs

20 March 2019

Researchers have designed a machine learning algorithm for drug discovery which has been shown to be twice as efficient as the industry standard.