Nirmal Ghimire
University of Notre Dame, IN·Physics·Early-career
Today's computer chips store and process information using the electron's charge. Electrons also have spin, a built-in magnetic property.
- Fields
Physics
Materials Science
- Topics
quantum materials
magnetic topological materials
kagome lattice
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Synthesize kagome lattice magnets, materials with magnetic atoms on a corner-sharing triangle network, and use magnetotransport measurements to study how topological effects in real and momentum space interact.
- Synthesize recently predicted collinear antiferromagnets and test experimentally whether crystal symmetry gives them ferromagnet-like properties without net magnetization or spin-orbit coupling.
- Determine how crystal structure breaks the energy degeneracy of electron states to couple electronic topology with magnetism, guiding the design of new quantum materials.
More about the research
Devices that use spin as well as charge could be thinner, faster and more energy-efficient. The challenge is finding materials in which charge and spin interact to give useful new properties. This project asks how a material's crystal structure, the repeating arrangement of its atoms, can be designed to create that coupling. Such materials could support spin-based electronics (spintronics), low-loss electronics and quantum computing.
Why it matters
Chip makers and quantum technology developers need materials that use electron spin as well as charge to build devices that are smaller, faster and use less energy. New kagome magnets and antiferromagnets that act like ferromagnets without net magnetism could become building blocks for spintronics, dissipationless electronics and quantum computing.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Pengcheng Dai
Rice University, TX·Physics
Grow and characterize single crystals of layered 2D magnetic materials with honeycomb and kagome lattices, the structures of interest for spintronics and exotic magnetism.
Lu Li
University of Michigan, MI·Physics
Use thermoelectric and thermal Hall measurements to determine the nature of the magnetic-field-driven insulator-to-metal transition and the origin of quantum oscillations in Kondo insulators.
Jian Wang
Wichita State University, KS·Materials Science
Tune the magnetic properties of the room-temperature 2D ferromagnet 1T-CrTe2, especially its in-plane spin alignment, by intercalating guest species between its layers using chemical and electrochemical methods.
The school
University of Notre Dame: 19 labs on PI Pages, $346M a year on research, 277 research doctorates a year.
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