Optical holography, materials science, and neutron optics

Supervisor: Martin Fally

Master projects in our group aim at designing and characterising diffractive optical elements for (very) cold neutrons. Experimental light optical holographic techniques applied to photosensitive complex media such as polymer nanocomposites are used to reach this goal. Current topics are at the interface of materials science, nonlinear light optics and neutron optics. Experiments are performed in local labs as well as at research centers in France (ILL, Grenoble) and Switzerland (PSI, Villigen). If your are interested in learning more, please contact martin.fally@univie.ac.at or juergen.klepp@univie.ac.at.

Theory and magnetic simulation of magnonic devices

Supervisor: Dieter Suess

Micromagnetic simulations coupled to molecular dynamic

Supervisor: Dieter Suess

Magnetic sensors based on GMR / TMR sensors

Supervisor: Dieter Suess

Numerical Micromagnetics

Supervisor: Claas Abert

Micromagnetic simulations form the backbone of many theoretical investigations when it comes to microscopic magnetic devices such as sensors and storage applications. The micromagnetic model is a continuous model that can be used to describe both static and dynamic magnetization processes by means of partial differential equations. Our group is developing various codes for the efficient solution of the micromagnetic equation with the finite-element and the finite-difference method. In order to allow for the simulation of larger systems and to reduce computation times, we have some very interesting master projects that focus on numerical algorithms. Candidates should have a background in programming and numerical algorithms.

Possible topics include the implementation of an FFT accelerated Strayfield algorithms for our finite-element code, the optimization of our finite-element code for parallel execution of the VSC computational cluster and the development of a combined finite-difference/finite-element method.

Magnetoelastic simulation of surface-acoustic wave devices

Supervisor: Claas Abert

Surface acoustic waves (SAW) generated by so-called interdigital transducers on piezoelectric thin-films have been extensively studied and found their way into numerous applications such as radio frequency filters and oscillators. In quite recent works, the interaction of SAWs to magnetoelastic materials were studied by placing a magnetic thin film on a piezoelectric material. This combination offers a lot of interesting technological opportunities e.g. by exploiting the non-reciprocal behaviour of certain magnetic systems. This master project aims to extend our micromagnetic simulation software to include magnetoelastic effects and use this code in order to explore new magnetic material systems subject to magnetoelastic excitations. Depending on the interests of the candidate this topic can be shifted either towards the modelling part (more programming) or towards the physics part (more simulation).

Micromagnetic simulation of novel spintronics devices

Supervisor: Claas Abert

Recently, our group was involved in the discovery of a new kind of spacer material for magnetic multilayers that allows for the noncolinear coupling of two ferromagnetic layers with a precise control on the coupling angle. In this master project, we aim to explore the possibilities to use this novel material in spintronics devices such as magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) cells, spin-torque oscillators (STOs) and sensors by means of micromagnetic simulations.

Polar domain walls in non-polar materials

Supervisor: Wilfried Schranz

Ferroelectric domain walls domain walls represent new and exciting objects in matter. In contrast to ferromagnetic systems, elastic interactions are of primary importance in ferroelectric materials, which makes a Landau-Ginzburg analysis rather cumbersome. Recently we have developed a new method by combining group theoretical layer group analysis with the symmetry properties of the order parameter. It turns out, that this method is very useful for characterizing the tensor properties of thick and thin domain walls, even for the case when in the domain wall new order parameters appear, which are not present in the bulk.

The present master projects aim to apply these group theoretical methods to selected crystals which are promising for the development of ferroelectric domain walls and calculate the corresponding equations of states, domain wall profiles, domain wall properties, etc. If you are interested, please contact wilfried.schranz@univie.ac.at.

Dynamic mechanical analysis of crystals, glasses and polymers

Supervisor: Wilfried Schranz/Viktor Soprunyuk

Our group has a long standing expertise in the study of dynamic elastic properties of materials in a broad temperature and frequency range. Materials range from ferroic crystals near structural phase transitions, to glasses and polymers. The present master project aims to investigate the dynamic elastic properties of a material, which will be selected depending on the interest of the applicant.

For more details, please contact wilfried.schranz@univie.ac.at or viktor.soprunyuk@univie.ac.at.