Category Archives: Uncategorized

Aly, Jen and Otto have had a great time learning all about crystallography at the PCG Summer school last week! Taking place at the beautiful Cosener’s House in Abingdon, they enjoyed lectures on topics such as phonons, magnetic irreproducible representations and Landau theory. There was also time for lots of socialising, with a fantastic quizContinue reading “Aly, Jen and Otto Attend the PCG 2022 Summer School”

This week was the annual postgraduate research symposium at Birmingham and we had 3 group members presenting! Aly started the day with a great presentation on some of his recent experiments on his Ru-based compounds. Then Tristan delivered a great poster on his synthesis and magnetic characterisation work of MOFs. Jen finished the day byContinue reading “Aly, Jen and Tristan Present at the Birmingham Postgraduate Symposium”

Lucy and Jen attended the biannual conference on highly frustrated magnetism (HFM) this week in Paris! This conference brings together our community for a week, and showcases the latest developments in the frustrated magnetism field. Lucy kicked off the conference with a fantastic presentation on our groups work on the Barlowite family, led by KateContinue reading “Lucy and Jen Attend HFM 2022!”

This week, the ILL celebrated a very special birthday – 50 years since the reactor started running. To celebrate, a full program from current and past staff was shared with the whole staff on Thursday at the World Trade Centre in Grenoble. The final session was dedicated to the ILL’s science output, including a veryContinue reading “Jen Presents at the ILL’s 50 Years of Neutrons!”

Our latest paper from our group is out now in Chem Mater! This work, led by Sam, but including many other group members (Kate, Aly, Tristan and Otto) focuses on our work on kagome MOFs. Here, we characterise the chemical and magnetic properties of 4 MOFs using a combination of single crystal and powder diffraction,Continue reading “New Paper in Chem Mater!”

Every year all the ILL PhD students gather for their annual clip show. Each student gets only 4 minutes to explain their thesis – a challenging task! The directors and heads of the graduate school then pick a winner from each year. This year, Jen decided to tell the story of her favourite material andContinue reading “Jen Wins the ILL Clip Show!”

We are thrilled that Lucy has won this years RSC Materials Chemistry Division Early Career Award for outstanding contributions to the discovery, characterisation and understanding of quantum magnets! Also from the Chemistry department at Birmingham was Prof. Andrew Dove who won the Corday-Morgan Prize for brilliance in research and innovation. Congratulations Lucy!

Sam was recently invited to give a talk at the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source’s Theoretical and Experimental Magnetism Meeting. Talks covered a diverse range of current research in the field of magnetism, with the title of Sam’s talk being “Realisations of the S = 1/2 kagome ferromagnet in coordination frameworks.” He really enjoyed theContinue reading “Sam gives a talk at TEMM 2022”

After nearly two years of the pandemic, we are finally getting back to doing experiments as a group, and we’ve done quite a few over the past month! Firstly, Grady got the opportunity to go to Grenoble to join Jen on an experiment on the ID22 beamline at ESRF. This is our groups second visitContinue reading “Back to in person experiments!”

A momentous week for the group as our shiny new Quantum Design MPMS3 instrument was installed. Quantum Design’s MPMS3 is a SQUID magnetometer for magnetic property measurements of materials. Our system has a wide range for measurement capability, with high and low temperature, high pressure, ultra-low field and electric transport options available. This exciting newContinue reading “Midlands Mag-Lab Up and Running!”