Research Interests

Primary Research Areas

Our research interests span the areas of Quantum Materials, Spintronics, and Low Temperature Instrumentation. Our core interests include: 

1. Spin Currents in Quantum Materials

The generation and manipulation of magnon-driven spin current lies at the heart of contemporary spintronics, attracting interest both for their fundamental physical significance and their promise for technological applications.  Unlike conventional charge currents, spin currents exhibit markedly different scattering mechanisms, enabling functionalities that could underpin the next generation of spin-based devices. Notably, such currents can also be sustained in magnetic insulators, opening a pathway toward magnonic architectures. Our work focuses on assessing strongly correlated quantum materials as prospective platforms for hosting and manipulating these magnonic spin currents. We excite spin currents through thermal gradients as well as electromagnetic and acoustic waves, and detect them electrically via the inverse spin Hall effect. In magnetic metals, the intimate coupling between spin and charge transport provides a powerful probe of microscopic phenomena, particularly in the vicinity of phase transitions, allowing us to extract rich information about the underlying correlated physics. 

2. Strongly correlated oxides with large spin-orbit interactions

We have been exploring the magnetic properties of a range of previously unexamined strongly correlated oxide systems, with the objective of elucidating their structure–property relationships. A central motivation is to uncover emergent phenomena and novel functionalities arising from strong spin–orbit coupling.

Our focus is primarily on ruthenates and iridates, whose partially filled 4d and 5d electron shells provide an exceptionally rich platform for realizing spin–orbital–entangled physics. These materials are typically realized in perovskite-derived architectures—such as double and triple perovskites—which further enable controlled tuning of lattice dimensionality and magnetic exchange interactions.

3. Low temperature Instrumentation:

A major thrust of our group’s research is the design and development of bespoke low-temperature instrumentation for the investigation of quantum materials. Our objective is to develop highly sensitive measurement platforms that are either unavailable commercially or prohibitively expensive in standard off-the-shelf systems. prohibitively expensive in standard off-the-shelf systems.  In recent years, we have successfully established several advanced low-temperature experimental facilities, including: 

a) Apparatus to measure the spin Seebeck effect and the anomalous Nernst effect

b) Apparatus to measure dielectric hyper-susceptibilities of solids

c)  A low-temperature 3-omega apparatus for measurement of thermal conductivity

d) A Resonant Ultrasound Spectrometer to measure elastic constants of solids

e) A  Broadband Cryogenic Ferromagnetic Resonance Spectrometer

f) A low-temperature probe of the Acousto-Electric Effect 

g) A low-temperature ac  susceptometer to study the magnetic susceptibility