News

4/1/2025: Fantastic day for Rohan Chakraborty! Rohan, coadvised by Prof. Vivian Ferry and Chris, successfully defended his thesis on photonic applications of electrolyte-gated complex oxides as voltage-tunable phase-change materials.  
 
3/21/2025: The Leighton Group delivered several presentations at the APS Global Physics Summit this week in Anaheim, CA. Chris gave an invited talk on the group's work on metallic delafossites, while Yu Tao presented on delafossites and doped NiS2. 
 
1/17/2025: Our group presented multiple times at the joint MMM/Intermag conference this week in New Orleans, LA. Yu Tao presented on both doped NiS2 and PdCrO2, while Chris presented Ben Kaiser's work on interfacial resistance tuning in non-local spin valves. 
 
12/13/2025: Big congrats to Ben Kaiser, who successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis today! Ben presented on signal enhancements in metallic non-local spin valves for next-generation readers in hard disk drives.
 
9/23/2024: The group is busy with HFIR and SNS neutron scattering experiments this month. Our work there focuses on doped NiS2, operando electrolyte gating of magnetic peorvskites, and PdCoO2 and PdCrO2 metallic delafossites. 
 

8/18/2024: Chris delivered an invited presentation in San Diego, CA today, at the SPIE Spintronics symposium. The talk featured work led by Ben on the optimization of metallic non-local spin valves for reader spin accumulation sensors. 

7/26/2024: Congratulations to Justin Ramberger! Justin defended his thesis today on spin transport in novel light metals and alloys.

5/29/2024: Yeon presented his work at the IPRIME meeting this week, on the use of MN natural resources for pyrite photovoltaics.

5/21/2024: The group will present multiple posters this week at the Center for Quantum materials workshop on campus. The presentations will feature the group’s work on delafossites. 

5/6/2024: Yi “Johnny” Zhang successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis today, on the origins of the ultrahigh conductivity of the metallic delafossite PdCoO2. Congratulations Johnny!

3/4/2024: The Leighton Group will be well represented at the APS March Meeting this week, in our home town of Minneapolis, MN. Ben, Jerry, Nileena, Justin, Yu, Fred, and Johnny are all delivering talks. 

1/14/2024: Chris delivered an invited talk today at the PCSI meeting in Santa Fe, NM, on the group’s recent work on metallic delafossite materials.