Group Members:
Principal Investigator: Oleg Shpyrko, Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Physics, Harvard University, 2004
Dr. Jyoti Mohanty, Postdoctoral Fellow
Ph.D. Physics, Paul Drude Institute, Humboldt University, Germany 2005
Jyoti is working on x-ray magnetic dichroism studies of magnetic thin films as well as magnetic and orbital domains in manganese oxides
 Ash Tripathi, Graduate Student B.S. Electrical Engineering, U. Illinois Urbana-Champaign 2005 M.S. Physics, UC San Diego 2007 Ash is working on development and application of novel coherent x-ray scattering techniques to studies of magnetic and electronic phases characterised by complex disorder and slow dynamics. |
 Yeling Dai, Graduate Student B.S. Physics, The University of Science and Technology of China, 2006 Yeling is working on studying structure and dynamics of nanoconfined materials, such as liquids, soft matter and nanoparticles. |
Collaborators: (past and present)
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Our group currently has several openings at postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate student level.
Contact Oleg Shpyrko for more information at 
Examples of Research Directions:
- Nanoscale Dynamics using X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy
- Coherent X-ray Microscopy
- Nanoconfined liquids
- Atomic Structure of Liquid-Solid and Liquid-Vapor Interfaces
- Mesoscale phase separation in electronic and magnetic materials
Detailed description:
PhD research project opportunities available in a newly formed experimental condensed matter physics group at UCSD (PI: Oleg Shpyrko)
- Study of phase coexistence, domain formation and dynamics in electronic and magnetic materials characterized by strongly competing spin, charge, orbital and lattice degrees of freedom. Research will answer questions such as: How does presence of quenched disorder affect fluctuations of spin or charge order parameters? Can artificial pinning centers be utilized to produce novel nanoscale devices? Can we tune quantum mechanical vs. classical mechanisms of relaxation, and take advantage of anomalously slow glassy dynamics, memory and aging effects for data storage and computing devices?
- Properties of materials in nanoscale confinement. How small is too small? When confined at nanometer lengthscales, the materials can suddenly change their behavior. Fluids stop flowing and do not freeze down to very low temperatures, or sometimes show opposite behavior of ordering in crystalline-like fashion at temperatures well above melting point. Critical phenomena and liquid-glass transition are also expected to be affected by reduced dimensionality and the confinement geometry.
In addition to in-house experimental facilities at UCSD, these projects will benefit from newly available coherent x-ray sources such as Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab near Chicago, Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford.
Techniques used by our group will involve study of nanoscale dynamics in the bulk using X-ray and Laser Photon Correlation Spectroscopy, novel x-ray and laser microscopy based on lens-less imaging using phase retrieval algorythms, as well as phase-contrast imaging, diffraction and reflectivity microscopy using recently available sub-micron focused x-ray beams.
For more details contact Oleg Shpyrko at
List of relevant references:
O. G. Shpyrko et al., "Direct measurement of
antiferromagnetic domain fluctuations"
Nature
447, 68 (2007)
R. Jaramillo et al., "Microscopic and Macroscopic
Signatures of Antiferromagnetic Domains"
Phys.
Rev. Lett. 98, 117206 (2007)
K. J. Alvine, O. G. Shpyrko et al., "Capillary
filling of anodized alumina nanopore arrays"
Phys.
Rev. Lett. 97, 175503 (2006)
E. D. Isaacs, "Microscopy: X-ray nanovision",
Nature 442, 35
(2006)
