Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

This programme will employ advanced state-of-the-art numerical models, and sophisticated theoretical approaches, to drive forward a new generation of materials and train the next generation of scientists able to create them. Over the past decades there have been striking advances in the technology to sculpt materials on nanometre lengthscales. In many practical respects, these impressive achievements have outstripped our ability to realise their full potential simply because of the enormous parameter space for exploration that they have opened. What is lacking is an accurate way of predicting which design and what combination of components is most likely to be interesting from a materials physics and/or technological application of view, and availability of a theoretical infrastructure for the analysis of experimental data. This programme will fill this gap, and build a predictive infrastructure for the promising and intellectually exciting new capabilities emerging from materials physics.Through this programme HQP will learn to develop and use numerical techniques and theoretical tools to examine how controllable functionality can emerge in ferroic materials that are possible to create using two and three dimensional nanolithography. The fundamental physics determining collective material properties, useful for a wide variety of applications, will be investigated and understood for systems with novel and interesting emergent properties. Results from HQP projects will motivate new experimental investigations and provide support for on-going experimental studies. Experts will be trained in the creation of predictive, multi-scale models and achieve an in-depth understanding of how atomic level properties can be used to produce a variety of electromagnetic functionality. The models developed will be used for nanopatterned arrays of magnetic elements whose magnetic properties can be constrained by the patterning, and changed by application of external magnetic and electric fields. The new functionality of these arrays will appear in their electromagnetic properties at GHz and THz frequencies and will be important for power efficient device design in information and communication technologies. Unexpected properties and phenomena are expected to emerge from competing interactions engineered into the design of these systems. In this regards, these materials will also provide new model systems through which HQP will be able to explore open fundamental problems in condensed matter and materials physics such as geometrical frustration, dynamics far from equilibrium, and mesoscopic quantum phenomena.