Condensed Matter Experiment | Bruce D. Gaulin | People

Bruce Gaulin

I am an experimental condensed matter physicist, working in the general area of scattering studies of exotic ground states in new, mostly magnetic, materials. This means that we (my grad students, postdocs, collaborators and myself) make new materials which we think will have interesting and exotic ground states, and then take these materials to forefront neutron and x-ray scattering facilities in North America and around the world.

We perform scattering experiments on these new materials and then work either independently or with our friends in theory to interpret the experiments, and thereby shed light on the exotic properties of the new materials. At present we have three themes to our work; geometrically frustrated magnets, quantum magnets with singlet ground states, and high temperature superconductors. You can read more about our focus on these topics in this introduction.

Jerod Wagman

Jerod has been studying the magnetic structures and low lying spin excitations in high temperature superconductors at low doping. His upcoming MSc. thesis will focus on the temperature and doping dependences of magnetism in La(2-x)BaxCuO4. The goal is to understand how the introduction of mobile disorder destroys the insulating three dimensional Neel state in the system, via a transition to two dimensional, incommensurate order.

He is also hoping to study the relationship between commensurate and incommensurate fluctuations and magnetic order in a family of heavy fermion superconductors, UNi2Al3 and UPd2Al3.

Jeremy Carlo

Jeremy's research involves diverse but specific aspects of magnetism in condensed matter physics, with a particular focus on the relationship between magnetism and unconventional superconductivity.

He is currently a Research Associate for the National Research Council, working at the Canadian Neutron Beam Centre in Chalk River, Ontario, where his principal research involves the use of neutron scattering.

He performed his doctoral work at Columbia University, working under Yasutomo J. Uemura, and his research involved development of a magnetic phase diagram for doped compounds related to the spin-triplet superconductor Sr2RuO4, and studies of magnetism in the recently-discovered iron pnictide superconductors using the muon spin relaxation method at TRIUMF in Vancouver, BC.

Kate Ross

Kate's research is focused on scattering studies of frustrated magnetic materials. Her main thesis work involves members of rare-earth-titanate series, a family of compounds whose magnetic ions form the highly frustrated "pyrochlore" lattice.

She is especially interested in Yb2Ti2O7, the subtleties of which occupy her mind day in and day out. She has also participated in the development of pulsed-magnet xray and neutron scattering techniques, and finds it very exciting to be involved in such leading-edge science.

Katharina Fritsch

Katharina's research involves neutron and x-ray scattering studies on both frustrated and un-frustrated magnetic materials. Her thesis work is mainly concerned with the investigation of the magnetism in cobalt vanadate, a material whose magnetic ions form a buckled version of the flat kagome lattice - a so-called kagome staircase structure. In particular, she's studying the effects of site-disorder and the influence of a transverse magnetic field on the magnetic phase diagram in this material, using neutron scattering techniques.

Katharina also works on frustrated pyrochlores with Kate, as well as quantum magnets that form singlet ground states at low temperatures.