The Physics Department | Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

Scientific Interests

I am an experimentalist investigating mostly the properties of magnetic and superconducting material. I have worked on materials such as spin glasses, frustrated magnets, molecular magnets, and high temperature superconductors. I use experiential techniques such as muon and nuclear spin resonance (mSR and NMR), angle resolved photo emission (ARPES), resonance photo emission spectroscopy (RPES), resonance elastic and inelastic x-ray scattering (REXS and RIEX), magnetometers, transport, and crystal growth.

My most important finding up to day is:

  1. Common energy scale for magnetism and superconductivity:
    We managed to show that superconductivity and magnetism in the cuprate superconductors share a common energy scale, namely, Tc and the superexchange interaction strength are proportional to each other. You can find our most important paper on the subject here.
  2. The stiffnessometer, a magnetic field free superconducting stiffness meter.
    We constructed a new instrument that can measure superconducting stiffness and coherence length without applying a magnetic field. This instrument excels when the stiffness is particularly small or coherence length is large, e. g.  close to the critical temperature. Consequently, it opens a window to reexamine phase transitions. A paper on the subject can be found here:

Other important findings are:

  1. Mapping exotic spin correlations in spin glasses:
    We found experimentally that close to the spin glass transition temperature Tg, the field dependent polarization of a probing spin P(H,t) scales like t/H. We interpreted this behavior using power law correlation function. The paper is here.
  2. The character of excitations in frustrated magnets:
    In frustrated magnets small groups of spins can rotate without changing the systems energy. One consequence of this motion is the possibility of strong dynamical spin fluctuations even as the temperature approaches zero. We found experimentally (by muon T1 measurements) that the dynamics in some frustrated magnets prevail even in the limit of zero temperature. The paper is here.
  3. Frustration driven distortion:
    Although it has been shown theoretically that spins on a pyrochlore lattice cannot order at any temperature, in reality these systems are rare. A possible reason for a phase transitions in real materials into magnetically ordered states is the coupling of the lattice with the spins. We found evidence for this magneto-elastic coupling in a study of the pyrochlore Y2Mo2O7 using Y NMR. Click here for the paper.
  4. Dephasing time on molecular magnets:
    We performed the only study existing to day of magnetic material where the spin value S is the variable. For that purpose we use isotropic molecular magnets (MM) with S ranging from 7/2 to 27/2. We found the dephasing time to be S independent and similar to 10 nsec. Here is the paper.
  5. Quantum ignition of deflagration in the Fe8 molecular magnet:
    We found that in the molecular magnet system Fe8, magnetic deflagration (the magnetic equivalent of a fire) can be ignited quantum mechanically at constant intervals of the magnetic field. For the paper go here.