© Simon Wegener

COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH CENTER 1238

Control and Dynamics of Quantum Materials

Spin orbit coupling, correlations, and topology

Advances in materials science are one of the strongest drivers of technological innovations and thereby shape our daily life, though often in an unseen way. Powerful examples from recent years include the advent of novel memory technologies building on magnetoresistance read/write heads, ferroelectric, and phase-change memories. The discovery of fascinating materials like graphene has led to a worldwide surge of research initiatives for innovative applications of these and other novel two dimensional materials. Spin-orbit coupled materials such as the recently discovered topological insulators from a new class of solids that have a strong potential for novel functionalities.

Material-based technological innovations are more often than not initiated on the basic-science level through discoveries of new concepts, phenomena, and principles governing the physical properties of quantum materials. Research on quantum materials is a rapidly developing and internationally highly competitive interdisciplinary field. At the forefront of this field, new materials are being investigated in which relativistic spin-orbit effects and non-trivial topologies are at center stage. At the same time, materials with strong electronic correlations exhibit a wealth of non-trivial quantum ordering phenomena including superconductivity, magnetism, and other exotic orders. Precisely at the intersection of these research fields, our collaborative research center aims at exploring, understanding, developing, and utilizing quantum materials to gain deliberate control of the physical properties of these materials and to understand their dynamics, explore driven states of matter, and enable new functionalities.

Our diverse team of principle investigators includes scientists from experimental and theoretical physics as well as crystallography, building and expanding on the excellent research infrastructure in Cologne embedded in the Excellence Initiative key profile area 'quantum matter and materials'. The Cologne team is augmented by excellent scientists with indispensable expertise from the University of Bonn and the Forschungszentrum Jülich. Guiding philosophies of our program are the ‘materials - physical properties - theory' cycle, which is one of the cornerstones of the success of condensed-matter physics at the University of Cologne, and a multifaceted approach arising from addressing scientific topics from a variety of different perspectives as defined in the focus areas of the program.

The CRC will consolidate and expand Cologne together with the associated groups from Bonn and Jülich as a leading international center within quantum condensed-matter physics. Our vision is to discover, understand, and control novel collective phenomena in quantum materials arising from the interplay of spin-orbit coupling, correlations, and topology.

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© Simon Wegener

Project Area A

Materials – preparation and characterization

A01 (Grüneis / Michely)

Spin-orbit coupling and many-body effects in novel 2D materials

A02 (Becker-Bohatý / Braden / Lorenz)

Crystal growth and design of materials

A04 (Ando / Yang)

Topological matter

Project Area B

Physical properties

B01 (Lorenz / Ando)

Transport and thermodynamics

B02 (Grüninger / Hemberger)

From mHz to PHz: Broadband dielectric and optical spectroscopy
of quantum matter

B03 (van Loosdrecht / Grüninger)

Inelastic photon scattering in spin-orbit-coupled matter

B04 (Braden)

Dynamics and correlations studied by neutron scattering

B05 (van Loosdrecht)

Optically driven matter

B06 (Michely / Ando)

Scanning tunneling spectroscopy

C01 (Atodiresei / Blügel)

Structure inversion-asymmetric  matter and spin-orbit
phenomena from ab-initio

C02 (Rosch / Trebst / Hermanns)

Spin-orbit driven topological and correlated states and
Dirac matter

C03 (Trebst / Diehl / Bulla)

Thermodynamics of fractionalization in spin-orbit entangled
matter

C04 (Diehl / Rosch)

Dynamics of topological and correlated states of matter

C05 (Kollath)

Driven quantum matter

Theory

© Simon Wegener

Speaker

Institute of Physics II

Institute for Theoretical Physics

Mineralogie

Administrative coordinator

Scientific coordinator

Peter Grünberg Institute

Helmholtz-Institut für
Strahlen- und Kernphysik