Walter-Schottky-Award for Felix Büttner
Dr. Felix Büttner is leading a Helmholtz Young Investigator group at HZB on topological solitons. © privat
The Walter Schottky Prize honours outstanding work by young physicists in solid-state research. For 2022, the award goes to HZB physicist Dr Felix Büttner for his groundbreaking achievements in the field of magnetic skyrmions.
"His work has contributed significantly to the understanding of the ultrafast generation and properties of these topological states."
This praise on Büttner's work is published on the website of the German Physical Society (DPG), which awards the Walter Schottky Prize.
The DPG further explains: Magnetic skyrmions are spin textures that behave like quasiparticles and have a non-trivial topology. Felix Büttner has made a decisive contribution to the fundamental understanding of the dynamics of skyrmions, taking their topology into account. He has used time-resolved X-ray holography and scattering experiments on X-ray lasers to elucidate the mechanisms of the generation of skyrmions by short laser pulses and to improve the possibilities for the fast and efficient movement of skyrmions by current pulses in ladder structures.
Felix Büttner studied in Göttingen and received his PhD in 2013 for his work at the interface of magnetism (Mathias Kläui, JGU Mainz) and X-ray physics (Stefan Eisebitt, TU Berlin). After a stint in industry at Daimler AG, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with G.S.D. Beach in 2015-2020. Since 2020, he has been leading an independent research group at the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie.
The award is expected to be presented in March 2022 during the DPG Spring Meeting in Regensburg.
- Ultrafast demagnetisation - Thinner iron, stronger effectThe thinner an iron film, the more easily it can be demagnetised by a laser pulse. Researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen, working with Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and other partners, have discovered why: the key lies in the magnetic order at the material's interfaces. In the long term, these findings could contribute to the development of new technologies for magnetic data storage. The results have been published in the scientific journal Advanced Science.
- Patterns of polar vortices in lead-free superlattices on siliconA team at HZB has, for the first time, reported polar vortices in (BaTiO3/SrTiO3)10 superlattices on silicon. These results expand the range of materials and substrates on which polar topological textures can occur and open up new options for incorporating complex ferroelectric states into silicon-based technologies.
- Spin waves inside a nano-oscillator imaged for the first timeFor the first time, researchers have directly imaged the magnetisation dynamics inside a spin Hall nano-oscillator — a nanoscale device that converts direct current into tunable microwave signals and is a promising building block for energy-efficient wireless communication and brain-inspired computing. A Swedish–German team led by the University of Gothenburg and Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) achieved this using time-resolved scanning transmission X-ray microscopy at the MAXYMUS instrument at BESSY II. The results, now published in Advanced Materials, reveal spin-wave features that had escaped previous, indirect measurement techniques.