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.
- Spintronics at BESSY II: Domain walls in magnetic nanowiresMagnetic domains walls are known to be a source of electrical resistance due to the difficulty for transport electron spins to follow their magnetic texture. This phenomenon holds potential for utilization in spintronic devices, where the electrical resistance can vary based on the presence or absence of a domain wall. A particularly intriguing class of materials are half metals such as La2/3Sr1/3MnO3 (LSMO) which present full spin polarization, allowing their exploitation in spintronic devices. Still the resistance of a single domain wall in half metals remained unknown. Now a team from Spain, France and Germany has generated a single domain wall on a LSMO nanowire and measured resistance changes 20 times larger than for a normal ferromagnet such as Cobalt.
- Fractons as information storage: Not yet quite tangible, but closeA new quasiparticle with interesting properties has appeared in solid-state physics - but so far only in the theoretical modelling of solids with certain magnetic properties. An international team from HZB and Freie Universität Berlin has now shown that, contrary to expectations, quantum fluctuations do not make the quasiparticle appear more clearly, but rather blur its signature.
- Graphene on titanium carbide triggers a novel phase transitionResearchers have discovered a Lifshitz-transition in TiC, driven by a graphene overlayer, at the photon source BESSY II. Their study sheds light on the exciting potential of 2D materials such as graphene and the effects they can have on neighboring materials through proximity interactions.