Andrew Princep
PhD Student
Telephone: +61 2 6268 8764
Fax: +61 2 6268 8786
Email: andrew.princep@student.adfa.edu.au
Location: PEMS Sth, Room G36
Field of Study - Physics
Supervisor: Dr Annemieke Mulders, PEMS
Co-Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Glen Stewart, PEMS
Research Topic - Characterization of Electronic Multipole Moments in Rare Earth Intermetallic Compounds
The competition between some combination of Spin, Charge, Lattice, and Orbital degrees of freedom is at the heart of the functionality in many materials that are a current research focus, such as the superconducting Cuprates, Iron Pnictides, Colossal Magnetoresistive Manganites, and Multiferroic materials. Orbital order is specifically important to the properties of Colossal Magnetiresistive Manganites, Heavy Fermion compounds, and some exotic superconductors (such as the hidden-order compound URu2Si2). The family of compounds RB2C2 (R includes Y, Lu, Dy, Tb, Ho, Er) exhibit an array of ordering that includes superconductivity, magnetism, pure orbital order, and combinations of the above. The interplay between these order parameters is especially important because DyB2C2 exhibits the highest known pure orbital ordering temperature, and the magnetic members of this family all have closely related magnetic phases despite the presence or absence of an orbitally ordered phase. My present research focus is the characterization of orbital ordering in the Dy, Tb and Ho Borocarbides with both neutron and synchrotron techniques and the application of tensorial analysis, and the modelling of their ground states through mean field methods.