Supervisor: Irene Aguilera. Monolayer CrI3 has garnered significant attention due to its exceptional magnetic and electronic properties. As one of the first 2D materials discovered to exhibit intrinsic ferromagnetism at the monolayer level, it offers unique opportunities to explore low-dimensional magnetism, spintronic applications, and the interplay between magnetism and other quantum phenomena. Beyond its ferromagnetic nature, CrI3 has been proposed to be the host of the recently predicted concept of topological magnons. This might lead to applications in spintronics, quantum information processing, magneto-optical technologies, and magnon-based computing. A computational investigation of monolayer CrI3 can provide critical insights into these phenomena and guide experimental efforts to harness its unique properties.
In this project, you will calculate the magnon spectra of bulk and monolayer CrI3 to expose their topological nature. You will use methods based on many-body perturbation theory (MBPT) that are currently implemented in the first-principles code SPEX. The theoretical simulations will be run in the Dutch supercomputer Snellius and the German supercomputer JURECA.
This project is embedded in the Ab Initio Quantum Materials (AIQM) group. The research will be involved in an ongoing international collaboration, which will result in a joint publication on the magnonic properties of CrI3. This project is for you if you have a solid background in mathematics, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics, and you are interested in numerical simulations and properties of matter.
Literature:
Topological Magnons: A Review.
Many-Body Spin Excitations in Ferromagnets from First Principles.
Topological magnons in CrI3 monolayers: an itinerant fermion description.
Other projects: In the AIQM group, we do projects that are heavier in calculations (like the one above), but also others that are heavier in math, or in programming. Contact me for a project more tailored to your interest.