Morten Eskildsen
Professor, Department of Physics & Astronomy
- Office
- 228 Nieuwland Science Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556 - Phone
- +1 574-631-4010
- eskildsen@nd.edu
Chair, Department of Physics & Astronomy
Eskildsen Research Group Web Page: http://www.nd.edu/~vortex/
Research Interests
Professor Eskildsen’s research focuses on experimental studies of mesoscale magnetic structures, namely skyrmions in chiral magnets or vortices in superconductors.
Skyrmions form spontaneously in certain magnetic materials, when competing interactions are tuned by the temperature and magnetic field. The skyrmions are topologically stable magnetic structures, and are promising candidate for the next generation of data storage. We are investigating how skyrmions may be manipulated by electrical and thermal currents.
In a superconductor, vortices are formed in response to an applied magnetic field. The vortices possess particle-like characteristics, sharing common features with skyrmions as well as liquid crystals, colloids, and granular materials. As such they also present conceptually simple, two-dimensional model systems to study fundamental problems such as metastable states, nonequilibrium phase transitions and kinetics, and structural transformation at the mesoscopic scale. Secondly, the vortices may be used as probes of the superconducting state in unconventional or novel superconductors.
The main experimental tool is small-angle neutron scattering carried out at the High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and other neutron facilities. We will complement the neutron scattering results with molecular dynamics simulations.
Honors and Activities
Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, 2016
Fellow of the American Physical Society, 2014
Alfred P. Sloan research Fellow, 2005-2009
Education
M.Sc., University of Copenhagen, Denmark, 1994
Ph.D., University of Copenhagen and Risø National Laboratory, Denmark, 1998
Publications
A. W. D. Leishman, R. M. Menezes, G. Longbons, E. D. Bauer, M. Janoschek, D. Honecker, L. DeBeer-Schmitt, J. S. White, A. Sokolova, M. V. Milošević, and M. R. Eskildsen, Topological energy barrier for skyrmion lattice formation in MnSi, Phys. Rev. B 102, 104416 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.102.104416
K. E. Avers, W. J. Gannon, S. J. Kuhn, W. P. Halperin, J. A. Sauls, L. DeBeer-Schmitt, C. D. Dewhurst, J. Gavilano, G. Nagy, U. Gasser, and M. R. Eskildsen, Broken time-reversal symmetry in the topological superconductor UPt3, Nat. Phys. 16, 531-535 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-0822-z
E. R. Louden, C. Rastovski, L. DeBeer-Schmitt, C. D. Dewhurst, N. D. Zhigadlo, and M. R. Eskildsen, Nonequilibrium structural phase transitions of the vortex lattice in MgB2, Phys. Rev. B 99, 144515 (2019). 10.1103/PhysRevB.99.144515
S. Mühlbauer, D. Honecker, É. A. Périgo, F. Bergner, S. Disch, A. Heinemann, S. Erokhin, D. Berkov, C. Leighton, M. R. Eskildsen, and A. Michels, Magnetic small-angle neutron scattering, Rev. Mod. Phys. 91, 015004 (2019). 10.1103/RevModPhys.91.015004
C. Rastovski, C. D. Dewhurst, W. J. Gannon, D. Peets, H. Takatsu, Y. Maeno, M. Ichioka, K. Machida, and M. R. Eskildsen, Anisotropy of the Superconducting State in Sr2RuO4, Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 087003 (2013). 10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.087003
A. D. Bianchi, M. Kenzelmann, L. DeBeer-Schmitt, J. S. White, E. M. Forgan, J. Mesot, M. Zolliker, J. Kohlbrecher, R. Movshovich, E. D. Bauer, J. L. Sarrao, Z. Fisk, C. Petrovic and M. R. Eskildsen, Superconducting Vortices in CeCoIn5: Toward the Pauli-Limiting Field, Science 319, 177-180 (2008). 10.1126/science.1150600