4 Corners Southwest Ontario Condensed Matter Physics Symposium 2015

A series of fundamental discoveries over the past thirty years has dramatically improved our ability to read, write, and process magnetically stored information. I will briefly review some of these advances before focusing on the recently discovered and particularly promising spin-orbit torques…

Muon spin rotation/relaxation is a powerful technique for studying unconventional superconductors, whose order parameter doesn't have the same symmetry as its host material's crystal structure. I will describe our work on Sr2RuO4, UPt3, CuxBi2Se3 and other topical systems, some of which exhibit…

Double perovskites, a class of oxide materials with 3d and 5d transition metal ions, can realize a wide variety of interesting phases. Here we focus on our recent theoretical work suggesting the appearance of Chern insulators, and possible emergent nematic phases at Chern transitions in such systems…

Our search for new materials of (hopeful) relevance to materials physics is wide ranging. One of our primary interests is in finding new geometrically frustrated magnets and working on their structure-property relations. In this context in recent years we have found and grown crystals of a new class…

It has been recently established that a magnetized relativistic plasma yields an interesting example of a Weyl metal. I discuss the properties of magnetized relativistic plasma and its possible role in some astrophysics phenomena.

In this talk, I will discuss some of the recent progress made on low energy effective field theories for non-Fermi liquids. Based on a dimensional regularization scheme, physical properties of various non-Fermi liquid states can be computed in controlled ways. I will emphasize novel features that…

Recently three-dimensional versions of honeycomb-lattice iridates, beta and gamma phases of Li2IrO3, have been discovered. It has been theoretically suggested that these hyperhoneycomb iridates may hold promise for the realization of the Kitaev spin liquid or the exactly solvable model for the…

New developments in time-of-flight neutron spectroscopy allow a remarkably comprehensive determination of the full spin and phonon excitation spectrum in many materials. I will discuss these new techniques and show results from the "214" family of layered quantum magnets - which are also the La(2-x…