Morten Eskildsen

Education

• Ph.D., University of Copenhagen and Risø National Laboratory, Denmark, 1998
• M.S., University of Copenhagen, Denmark, 1994

Research Interests

Professor Eskildsen’s research focuses on experimental studies of mesoscale magnetic structures, namely skyrmions in chiral magnets or vortices in superconductors.

Skyrmions form spontaneously in certain magnetic materials, when competing interactions are tuned by the temperature and magnetic field.  The skyrmions are topologically stable magnetic structures, and are promising candidate for the next generation of data storage. We are investigating how skyrmions may be manipulated by electrical and thermal currents.

In a superconductor, vortices are formed in response to an applied magnetic field. The vortices possess particle-like characteristics, sharing common features with skyrmions as well as liquid crystals, colloids, and granular materials.  As such they also present conceptually simple, two-dimensional model systems to study fundamental problems such as metastable states, nonequilibrium phase transitions and kinetics, and structural transformation at the mesoscopic scale. Secondly, the vortices may be used as probes of the superconducting state in unconventional or novel superconductors.

The main experimental tool is small-angle neutron scattering carried out at the High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and other neutron facilities. We will complement the neutron scattering results with molecular dynamics simulations.