INVITATION: Colloquium with professor Tomáš Jungwirth
We cordially invite you to the FNSPE CTU colloquium on the topic: Altermagnetism: An Unconventional Spin-Ordered Phase of Matter. This talk explores how the newly discovered altermagnetism could revolutionize spintronic technology by overcoming the fundamental limitations of conventional magnetism.
WHEN? May 28, 2025, from 4:00 PM
WHERE? Břehová 7, Prague 1, room B-103
IMPORTANT! The lecture will be in English.
Coffee and tea will be available half an hour before the start. We look forward to seeing you there!
ABSTRACT:
The research beyond conventional magnetism, which led to the recent discovery of altermagnetism, was largely motivated by the field of spintronics. From an applied perspective, spintronics is a modern branch of integrated-circuit technologies currently undergoing a transition from niche to mass production, in particular thanks to embedded non-volatile memories complementing semiconductors on advance-node processor chips.
The functionality of present spintronic memories is based on the magnetization in conventional ferromagnets which generates well separated and conserved spin-up and spin-down channels in the electronic structure. Simultaneously, however, the magnetization sets physical limits on the spatial, temporal and energy scalability of the spintronic technology.
In the talk we will show that altermagnetism opens a prospect of removing these limits by combining well separated and conserved spin-up and spin-down channels with no net magnetization. Altermagnetism enables this extraordinary combination of properties thanks to the unconventional nature of the magnetic ordering whose symmetry is reminiscent of unconventional superfluidity.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Prof. Mgr. Tomáš Jungwirth, Ph.D. is a leading Czech physicist specializing in solid-state physics and spintronics. He heads the Department of Spintronics and Nanoelectronics at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences and also serves as a professor at the School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom.
He graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University, earning a Ph.D. in condensed matter physics in 1997. During his doctoral studies and subsequent postdoctoral fellowship, he worked at Indiana University and the University of Texas in the United States. In 2004, he was appointed professor at the University of Nottingham, and in 2007 he founded the Department of Spintronics and Nanoelectronics at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
His research focuses on spintronics, particularly the use of antiferromagnetic materials in electronic devices. In 2018, his team demonstrated that antiferromagnets allow data to be written up to a thousand times faster than conventional memory media, representing a breakthrough in information technology.
For his scientific achievements, he has received numerous awards, including the Otto Wichterle Prize (2002), the Neuron Award for a Major Scientific Discovery (2018), and the Czech Head National Prize (2024).
Professor Jungwirth is also a member of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic and actively collaborates with leading scientific institutions worldwide