This internship concerns the high throughput fabrication and characterization of thin film libraries of hard magnetic materials. Compositionally graded RE-TM based films will be fabricated by sputtering. The influence of composition and post-deposition annealing conditions (temperature and time) on both structural and magnetic properties will be explored using high throughput scanning characterization techniques. Composition will be characterized by Energy Dispersive X-Ray analysis in a scanning electron microscope, crystal structure by X-Ray Diffraction and magnetic properties will be probed using an in-house developed scanning polar Magneto-Optic Kerr effect system. More detailed structural (SEM imaging of microstructure) and magnetic (M(H,T)) characterization will be carried out on select samples. Experimental data sets will be analyzed to search for trends in the evolution of both intrinsic and extrinsic properties.

This internship aims at developping microfluidic devices embedding micro-magnets to control precisely the trajectories of magnetic species in microfluidic channels. This new degree of control will allow for the development of new tools for analytical chemistry, medical diagnosis, and life sciences.

Ferromagnetic thin-films are the main component of hard disks for data storage, magnetic random access memories, magnetic sensor technology based on giant- and tunnel magnetoresistance and also prototypes of logic and memory devices using domain walls. The main characteristics of these devices  is their ability to control the magnetic state of the thin films either by magnetic fields or, more interestingly, by electric current pulses. 

Frustrated systems host intriguing states of matter, for instance having non-zero entropy at zero temperature. Our group explores their physics at different lengthscales and with different kinds of degree of freedom (magnetic, structural), in two-dimensional (2D) lattices. Going beyond our usual static 2D imaging of correlated disorder in these systems, the internship addresses the time dimension, to understand how disorder dynamically evolves, possibly in a spatially and temporally correlated way between different regions of the lattices.