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MaNEP Newsletter n°39
Mila_Frederic
At a time where collaborations are often driven by grant proposals and shared funds, one may wonder if there is any interest in maintaining an association such as MaNEP that does not provide money to its members but asks them to pay. Of course there is the winter school in Saas Fee and the meeting in Les Diablerets every other year, but the organisation of such meetings does not require the infrastructure of an association such as MaNEP, and in 2018, six years after the end of the NCCR that is at the origin of MaNEP, this legitimate question might have crossed the mind of some of the members.
If anything, 2019 has proven how useful it actually is to have such an association in Switzerland. The research on new materials with interesting electronic properties shows an impressive vitality worldwide, yet the new NCCR campaign has not led to the creation of new centres of competence that could fund and coordinate the research in this field. In such circumstances, it is of the utmost importance to maintain the link between the members of the community, and the MaNEP association is a fantastic chance, not to say a unique opportunity, to achieve this goal. Even more, it can act as the think tank that promotes the emergence of new ideas and initiatives that will shape research in this field in the future. The focus session on Magnetic Skyrmions at the joint SPS-ÖPS meeting in Zürich in August or the one-day workshop on Material Discovery that took place in Bern in November are excellent examples of the kind of events that MaNEP can and should promote to prepare the future.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Prof. Christoph Renner, the first president of this association, and Prof. Nicola Spaldin for their dedication during their terms as board members, and to welcome two new members, Profs. Christian Bernhard (UniFR) and Steve Johnson (ETHZ).

Looking at all the beautiful achievements reported in this newsletter, the news faces, the numerous awards, it is clear that the future of the research embodied by the MaNEP association is bright. Let’s hope that, besides the 2020 edition of the Diablerets workshop, next year will witness numerous initiatives within the MaNEP association to push further the frontiers of this fascinating field.

Frédéric Mila

What's new?

MaNEP Workshop and Forum meeting at University of Bern

Workshop_Bern
The MaNEP Network met at the University of Bern, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, for a Workshop on Materials Discovery and its annual Forum Meeting. During the workshop the principle investigators of six leading materials discovery and synthesis groups at the ...

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High performance chemical analysis and imaging in Geneva

LTA
The Laboratory of Advance Technology (LTA) in Geneva has launched a new platform for chemical analysis and imaging. Open to both academics and industry, this platform provides access to a nano-TOF SIMS and an XPS, and is the only lab in Switzerland to provide access to both of these complementary techniques.

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New diffractometer in the Crystallography Lab at UNIGE

Diffractometer
A new single-crystal X-ray diffractometer was installed in the Laboratory of Crystallography at UNIGE. This dual micro-focus source diffractometer (Mo, Cu) is equipped with a new generation curved photon counting X-ray detector (RIGAKU Hypix arc 150), allowing very fast measurements since more data are collected in a single exposure. The detector ...

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MaNEP special session at the annual SPS meeting

SPS
This year MaNEP organized again a special session at the annual Swiss Physical Society meeting that took place last August at the University of Zurich. The MaNEP session focused on the recent developments in the study of materials with novel electronic phenomena arising from electronic correlations or topological properties.

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Magnetic skyrmions descend on annual meeting of SPS and ÖPG

Skyrmion_SPS
The exciting programme of this year’s joint annual meeting of SPS and ÖPG included a focus session on ‘Skyrmions in Magnetic Materials’ for the first time. The inclusion of the session heralds the rapidly developing Swiss-wide, interdisciplinary research effort into these topologically nontrivial magnetic ...

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TME Workshop 2019 in La Plata, Argentina

Workshop_TME
From 22nd-24th October 2019, the international workshop “Topology in Magnetism: Theory Meets Experiments (TME) 2019” took place in La Plata, Argentina. Around 50 participants enjoyed three days of focused talks and discussions on a range of topics related to topology and magnetism ...

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Irène Cucchi received the Flatlands poster prize

Irène Cucchi in the group of Felix Baumberger (UNIGE) received the Flatlands 2019 poster prize for her work on two-dimensional (2D) materials entitled “Microfocus laser-ARPES ...

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Cucchi_Irene

Claribel Dominguez obtained the iWOE26 poster prize

Claribel Dominguez, in the group of Prof. Jean-Marc Triscone (UNIGE), currently working on the exciting field of “oxide interface physics”, received the iWOE26 poster prize ...

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Dominguez_Claribel

Antoine Georges received the APS Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics

The American Physical Society has awarded its 2020 Aneesur Rahman Prize for Computational Physics to Antoine Georges “for the development of the Dynamical ...

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Georges_Antoine

Marta Gibert won the iWOE prize for excellency in research

Marta Gibert, professor at the University of Zurich, won the iWOE prize for excellency in research. A prize for scientists below 40 who have demonstrated excellence in research ...

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Gibert_Marta

Edoardo Martino at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting

Edoardo Martino, PhD student in the group of Prof. Ana Akrap (UniFR) and Prof. László Forró (EPFL), was selected to take part at the prestigious Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting.

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Martino_Edoardo

Masafumi Horio was awarded the High-Temperature Superconductivity Forum young scientist research prize

Masafumi Horio, in the group of Johan Chang (UniZH), received the prestigious High-Temperature Superconductivity Forum young scientist research award at the Fall ...

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Horio_Masafumi

Nicola Spaldin received the Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist

Nicola Spaldin, Professor of Materials Theory at the ETH Zurich and member of the MaNEP Steering Comittee received the Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist for her ...

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Spaldin_Nicola

Scientific perspective

Unconventional Superconductivity
Forty years of exciting developments

Unconventional Superconductivity
By Prof. Manfred Sigrist, ETHZ
This year in May the 25th anniversary of the discovery of Sr2RuO4 was celebrated with a dedicated
workshop at ETH Zurich. Sr2RuO4 has been the second superconductor found in the class of
perovskite transition metal oxides after the cuprates and has ever since played an important role in
the field of unconventional superconductivity. One might expect that after 25 years such a workshop would be a mere wrap up combined with a nice party. But it turned out completely different. Just a few months prior to the event new experimental data turned things upside down.

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Scientific highlights

Spin fluctuation induced magnetic Weyl semimetal state in the paramagnetic phase of EuCd2As2

Ma_Science Advances
By Junzhang Ma, PSI
The realization of Weyl semimetals (WSMs) with time-reversal symmetry broken is one of the central issues in the research of novel topological phases in condensed matter. Weyl semimetals are one kind of exotic materials that host massless doubly degenerate Weyl fermions in non-centrosymmetric or ...

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Measuring the oxygen positions in an ultra thin film by XRD

Fowlie_Nano Letters
By Jennifer Fowlie, UNIGE
X-ray diffraction is a ubiquitous tool used in many areas of physical sciences for determining the structure of matter. There are two particular experimental challenges in measuring an x-ray diffraction signal; samples that are of too small a volume and atoms that are of too small a radius. These two ...

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Highlights publications

Discover more MaNEP Network's research and innovations trough other publication highlights.
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Portrait

Talk with Markus Müller
Senior scientist, Condensed Matter Theory Group, PSI

Muller_Markus
What has been your main research activity and your most interesting scientific findings over the last few years ? My research as a theorist is rather wide-spread across condensed matter physics. One of my main interests and playgrounds though concerns the interplay of interactions, quantum fluctuations and disorder, which gives rise to an enormous variety of complex phenomena.

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Upcoming events

16th Capri Spring School on Transport in Nanostructures
May 3-10, 2020, Capri Island, Italy
Ecole de physique des Houches
Emergent Electronic States Confined at Interfaces
July 6-25, 2020, Les Houches, France
Swiss Workshop on Materials with novel electronic properties (SWM)
August 31- September 2, 2020, Les Diablerets, Switzerland

(Photo credit: L. Windels/UNIGE, LTA, UNIGE, UNIZH, Flatiron Institute, Daniel Rihs, Philip Moll EPFL / MPI CPFS, PSI)
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