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I hope you and your closer ones are doing well during these
complex days, where the pandemic has shaken many facets of our everyday
life. Despite we may have become more efficient in some aspects, and not
to mention the reduction in CO2 emissions, it is clear that online
meetings cannot completely replace real ones.
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As many events this year, the MaNEP Winter School also had
to follow the steps of the SWM conference in Les Diablerets and was
postponed. This was a decision unanimously taken by the program
committee, the organizers and the MaNEP board members. The MaNEP Winter
School is a well-known brand, where physics, first-line speakers and
winter sports meet, resulting in a fantastic atmosphere enhancing
fruitful discussions and contributing to the formation of future
researchers in our field. It is a great experience that all of us who
attended former editions as students will always remember and which
cannot simply be replaced by an online event. Another proof of its
success is the 70 people already registered for the school at the time
of the cancellation. I would like to thank the organizing committees of
both the SWM conference and the Winter School for putting together such
exciting programs, and I definitely hope to be able to enjoy these
meetings again very soon.
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Nevertheless, and fortunately, research moves on, and the
MaNEP community (and its more than 280 members !) is as active as
always. The ability to foster synergies between experimentalists and
theoreticians as well as to establish interdisciplinary collaborations
is key to achieve novel breakthroughs. The results on fractional
antiferromagnetic skyrmion lattices highlighted by O. Zaharko and the
study of metal-insulator transitions in artificially layered oxide
heterostructures summarized by C. Dominguez are beautifully examples of
such synergies. The scientific perspective provided by O. Yazyev also
emphasizes the strategic role that computations play nowadays in
materials discovery and design.
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The end of the year is approaching and, while hoping that
the new one will bring us fresh air, let me wish you a joyful winter
period, merry Christmas and happy 2021 !
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I really hope to see you again soon ! Best wishes,
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What's new ?
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The recent surge of COVID-19 propagation in Switzerland and
Europe makes it impossible to maintain the Saas-Fee school as originally
planned in January 2021. After considering different options, the
organizers, program committee, and MaNEP board members have decided to
postpone the school by one year.
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The LTA received the Innovation Medal from the University of
Geneva (UNIGE). During the Dies Academicus ceremony on the 9th of
October 2020, Christoph Renner, Gilles Triscone, Jérémie Teyssier and
Nicolas Stucki received the medal from the Rector. This distinction
crowns a creative initiative that grew out of the NCCR MaNEP.
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The Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE) appointed Prof.
Carmine Senatore, DQMP, UNIGE, as Swiss Delegate to the International
Energy Agency (IEA)’s High Temperature Superconductor (HTS) Technology
Collaboration Programme (TCP).
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Irene Cucchi successfully defended her thesis at the DQMP,
UNIGE. In order to share part of her PhD work in simple terms and
accessible to all, Irene created the comic strip ”2D topological
insulators”, in collaboration with Flavie Ndam, illustrator.
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Edoardo Martino PhD student at the EPFL received the 2020
EPFL Physics Doctoral Thesis Award (EDPY Award) for his thesis:
“Electrons leave the flatland: out-of-plane charge dynamics in layered
materials” under the supervision of Prof. László Forró and Prof. Ana
Akrap, and in close collaboration with the team of Prof. Philip Moll.
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Jose Ferradas Troitino, PhD student in the group of Prof.
Carmine Senatore with a position funded by CERN, was awarded with the
Best Student Paper Price in the category Materials and the Victor Keilin
Memorial Award at the Applied Superconductivity Conference (ASC2020).
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Scientific perspective
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By Prof. Oleg Yazyev, EPFL First-principles
computer simulations are playing a crucial role in condensed matter
physics for already several decades. The application domain of such
computations is currently undergoing dramatic extension enabled by
automated computational workflows, open science culture, machine
learning and other recent developments. In this Scientific Perspective, I would like to express my view on computations as an instrument for the discovery and design of new materials.
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Scientific highlights
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Magnetic skyrmions, swirling configurations with topological
properties, typically exhibit nearly parallel alignment for
neighbouring spins. Such particles with antiparallel near spins can be
more easily controlled and are interesting for spintronic applications.
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By Claribel Dominguez, UNIGE Understanding
the mechanisms that control the metal-to-insulator transition in
correlated electron systems is one of important challenges in condensed
matter physics. Remarkably, little is known about the characteristic
lengths scale over which a metallic or insulating region can be
established and the physics that sets this length scale.
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Discover more MaNEP Network's research and innovations trough other publication highlights.
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Portrait
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What have been your primary field of research and your most surprising scientific finding during these last years ?
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I am an experimental physicist working in the world of
two-dimension of solid state, namely, conductors, semiconductors, and
insulators, at ultra-low temperature close to the absolute zero, and
under the influence of very high magnetic fields (thousand time stronger
than that of earth). In the past few years, I have been focusing on…
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(Photo credit: Xavier
Ravinet - UNIGE, ETHZ, Carla da Silva, Lionel Windels - UNIGE, Bernard
Mundet - EPFL/UNIGE, Flavie Ndam, PSI, EPFL, UNIGE)
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MaNEP Switzerland Network
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24, quai Ernest-Ansermet - 1211 Geneva 4
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