Author: Axel Hoffmann

Prof. Axel Hoffmann joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in summer 2019. Before his appointment at UIUC he was the Senior Group Leader of the Magnetic Thin Film Group within the Materials Science Division at the Argonne National Laboratory. His research interests encompass a wide variety of magnetism related subjects, including basic properties of magnetic heterostructures, spin-transport in novel geometries, and biomedical applications of magnetism. His main research focus has recently been on pure spin currents investigated by magnetotransport and magnetization dynamic measurements. He has more than 200 publications with combined more than 8000 citations (h-index: 49), four book chapters, and three magnetism-related U.S. patents. In addition, he is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Applied Physics. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, American Vacuum Society, and IEEE. Furthermore, he was in 2011 a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Magnetics Society, received in 2015 the Outstanding Researcher Award by the Prairie Section of the American Vacuum Society, in 2016 was awarded a President’s International Fellowship from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, received in 2017 the Distinguished Performance Award from the University of Chicago, and was selected as a Highly Cited Researcher by the Web of Science in 2019.

DOE funds project to explore magnetic materials for quantum information

Posted on by Axel Hoffmann

Our research group received funding of $4.2M over three years from the Department of Energy (DOE) to explore magnetic materials for quantum information systems.  Magnons, the fundamental excitations of magnetically ordered systems, have inherent chiral properties, which can give rise to non-reciprocal behavior.  In other words, magnetic materials may provide one-way streets for quantum information, which may be useful to reduce unwanted noise and therefore may enhance the efficiencies of quantum computers.  This project is a broad collaboration that includes additional research groups at UIUC (Pfaff, Schleife, and Zuo), as well as researchers at Argonne National Laboratory (Li and Novosad).  More information can be found here.

Research article about magnetoresistance in topological and ferrimagnetic insulator bilayer was featured by AIP Publishing

Posted on by Axel Hoffmann

Our recent research article “Proximity-induced anisotropic magnetoresistance in magnetized topological insulators” was featured by Applied Physics Letters.  This article discusses the magnetoresistance in bilayers of topological insulators (Bi2Se3) and ferrimagnetic insulator (Y3Fe5O12; YIG).  We observe that the orientation of the magnetization YIG controls the magnitude of the gap in the electronic band structure of the adjacent topological insulator.