We have several studentships including Case awards available in the areas of nanospintronics as well as quantum information processing. Prospective PhD students are invited to apply according to the University guidelines.

Ph.D. Opportunities 2019 

Ultra-fast spintronics (Dr C. Ciccarelli - cc538 at cam.ac.uk)

Magnetism constitutes the most stable way in which information can be stored. Moreover, differently from the charge-based memories in your laptop magnetic memories do not need to be refreshed, significantly reducing power consumption.
However, magnetic recording is slow, which is why it has been limited so far to mass data storage (hard disks and tapes).

Creating memories that combine the benefits of magnetic memories with the speed of RAMs would constitute a significant progress and leading IT companies are now heavily investing towards this goal.

Replacing ferromagnets with antiferromagnets is a possible strategy to achieve this since their magnetic order can be “written” 1000 faster than in FMs. However, in antiferromagnets the overall magnetisationis is zero and to readapt information technology we must find efficient ways to read and write their magnetic state without relying on the net magnetisation as for ferromagnets.

In this project you will be using optical pump-probe and THz emission spectroscopy to read and write an antiferromagnetic bit with a speed of one picosecond. 

Quantum Computing in Silicon (Dr M. F. Gonzalez Zalba - mg507 at cam.ac.uk)

As the downscaling of conventional computer technology is bound to reach its fundamental limit new algorithms will be the answer to achieve increasingly higher performance and reduced power consumption. One approach to overcome these difficulties is to use the laws of quantum physics in a quantum computer. This scheme can draw on effects like the superposition or the entanglement of quantum states to implement computation, algorithms and information storage. The individual elements, or bits, of a quantum computer are called qubits. By using specially tailored algorithms quantum computing is expected to provide e.g. faster data base searching or optimization problem solving.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/materials/will-silicon-save-quantum-computing

In our group you will explore one of the most promising candidates to achieve that goal, a solid-state approach based in the large industrial infrastructure of silicon transistor technology. You will use single electron spins to store and manipulate the quantum information, you will use ultrasensitive and fast detection techniques to read the quantum state of the qubit and finally you will aim to entangle distant qubits via single photons. Case funding from the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory is available.

Organic nanospintronics (Prof. Henning Sirringhaus - hs220 at cam.ac.uk)

This project will study spin transport in high mobility molecular semiconductors. These materials have long spin-diffusion length due to only weak spin-orbit interactions, but their spin physics is not well understood. You will investigate how the spin transport in these materials depends on molecular structure and orientation and how spin scattering is affected by the intra- and intermolecular excitations of the solid. We will also investigate improved designs for more efficient spin-injection into these materials. Although the focus of the project is on scientific understanding the project could potentially lead to the invention of new electro-magnetic device concepts with applications in magnetic memory, hard-disk readheads and general information storage technology. Case funding from the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory is available.

University of Cambridge, Department of Physics
Postdoctoral Research Positions in Microelectronics

Postdoctoral positions will be posted here.

The University is committed to equality of opportunity.