Department of Applied Physics Research Seminar: Fazel Tafti

Abstract:

I will present the recent developments in designing materials with bond-direction Kitaev interactions. Although the ultimate goal is to achieve a quantum spin liquid phase with long-range spin entanglement, there are many other exciting magnetic phases that can be achieved in these materials. An overview will be given on the first generation and second generation Kitaev magnets. The important terms in the Hamiltonian of such materials and the competition between them will be discussed both in the clean and disordered limit. This talk will be hopefully interesting to both theorists and experimentalists from both physics and materials science background.

Biography:

Fazel Tafti completed his PhD at the University of Toronto with Prof. Steven Julian. His thesis was focused on developing transport experiments under ultrahigh pressures in diamond anvil cells.

His first postdoc position at the University of Sherbrook with Prof. Louis Taillefer was focused on the thermal conductivity and thermoelectric measurements in iron-based superconductors under intense magnetic fields.

He then changed fields from physics to chemistry and completed a second postdoc at Princeton University with Prof. Bob Cava. His research was focused on the chemical synthesis of topological and magnetic materials.

He has been an assistant professor at Boston College (physics department) since 2016. His lab is interdisciplinary between physics, chemistry, and materials science.

Host: Prof. Jose Lado (Department of Applied Physics)

Zoom link available on request to [email protected].

Everybody interested welcome to attend!