3/31/23: Leighton Group undergraduate researcher Fred Tutt has been named a 2023 Goldwater Scholar!
10/5/2022: John and Chris delivered presentations this week at the International Workshop on Oxide Electronics in Portland, Maine.
7/21/2022: Chris delivered an invited plenary talk at the Solid State Ionics conference today in Boston.
5/19/2022. The group's spin transport research was just highlighted in an Editor's Suggestion in PRL: https://cse.umn.edu/cems/news/leighton-group-research-uncovers-new-spintronic-effect-aluminum
4/18/2022: Chris delivered seminars this week to the Q-MEEN-C EFRC and in Materials Science at Arizona State, both focused on electrolyte gating work.
11/30/2021: Congratulations Dr. Chaturvedi! Vipul defended his outstanding Ph.D. thesis today, focusing on electrolyte gating and perovskite cobaltite thin film magnetism and transport.
9/1/22: Chris was just named the new Director of the University of Minnesota MRSEC. https://cse.umn.edu/cems/news/professor-leighton-lead-nsf-sponsored-materials-research-science-and-engineering-center
2/22/2021: Chris gave a virtual seminar talk today in the Materials Science and Engineering department at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. The talk was on electrolyte-gate control of ferromagnetism. 11/16/2020: Chris delivered virtual seminars this week at the University of Arizona, University of Florida, and University of California San Diego, all on electrolyte-gate-controlled magnetism in oxides and sulfides.
10/30/2020: Congratulations Dr. Voigt!! Bryan defended his outstanding Ph.D. thesis today. Bryan's thesis focused on pyrite FeS2.
10/8/2020: Congratulations to Helin Wang who defended her outstanding Ph.D. thesis today on ionic gating of oxide semiconductors.
8/1/2020: Our electrolyte gated magnetism in pyrite paper has been featured on over 30 news outlets worldwide! See: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/31/eabb7721/tab-article-info, and https://www.cems.umn.edu/news/leighton-leads-breakthrough-collaborative-research
8/1/2020: The Leighton group is saying goodbye to three fantastic undergraduate students: Joey Gotchnik, William Moore, and Hudson Shih. We wish them good luck with the new job and graduate school careers!
7/29/2020: Our group's work on electrolyte gated ferromagnetism in diamagnetic FeS2 is published in Science Advances: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/31/eabb7721
7/23/2020: Chris delivered a virtual invited talk at the 2020 MISPOCHE meeting on SrTiO3.
6/13/2020: Chris delivered an invited presentation at the 2020 Virtual American Conference on Neutron Scattering. Neutron reflectometry as an operando probe of electrolyte gated magnetic materials was the topic.
5/1/2020: Chris received a 2020 Horace T. Morse-University of Minnesota Alumni Association Teaching Award and was inducted into the University of Minnesota Academy of Distinguished Teachers.
3/4/2020: The APS March Meeting was unfortunately canceled, but presentations by several group students and post-docs were posted for viewing.
2/7/2020: Chris was elected Fellow of the Neutron Scattering Society of America for "his insightful application of neutron scattering to advance the understanding of magnetic materials, including magnetically inhomogeneous systems, complex oxides and alloys, and magnetic heterostructures.".
1/28/2020: Chris delivered an invited talk on electrolyte gate control of ferromagnetism today at the Heraeus Seminar on Magnetoionics in Germany. Jeff Walter presented a contributed talk at the same meeting.
11/26/19: Chris was elected a fellow of the IEEE! For more details see: https://www.cems.umn.edu/news/leighton-elected-fellow-of-the-ieee
11/22/19: Chris gave a seminar today at the University of South Florida, in the Applied Physics program, on electrolyte gating of functional oxides.
11/18/19: We welcome Ben Kaiser, a 1st year PhD student, to the Leighton group! He will work on spin transport in metals.
11/6/19: Vipul delivered a presentation today on strain-induced majority carrier inversion in lanthanum cobaltite (LCO) at MMM in Las Vegas, NV.
11/5/19: Chris delivered an invited talk today in a magnetoionics symposium at the MMM Conference, on electrolyte gating of magnetic perovskite oxides.
10/24/19: Bryan delivered two presentations this week at the 66th International Symposium of the AVS in Columbus, OH.
8/23/2019: Chris delivered seminars on electrolyte gating this week at the Universities of Leeds, Liverpool, and Cardiff in the UK.
7/15/19: Bryan Voigt was selected as a finalist for the 2019 James Harper Award, the premier graduate student award of the American Vacuum Society's Thin Film Division. The final award session will take place at the American Vacuum Society's 66th International Symposium, held in Columbus, OH in October 2019
6/28/19: Will Postiglione passed his oral examination and is now a qualified CEMS Ph.D. student!
6/19: The UMN CQM (Center for Quantum Materials) has been renewed for another three-year funding cycle. Chris, Turan Birol, Bharat Jalan, Martin Greven, and Rafael Fernandes are PIs in the center. This DOE investment will fund work on complex oxides, with a strong emphasis on neutron scattering.
5/17/19: Jialiang Chen passed his oral examination and is now a qualified CEMS Ph.D. student!
5/3/19: Chris delivered a seminar today at Stanford University, in the Materials Science and Engineering Department. His talk was on Electrolyte Gating of Complex Oxides.
4/26/19: 4th year PhD student Bryan Voigt was awarded a University of Minnesota Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for 2019-2020. Congratulations Bryan!
3/8/19: Group members Helin Wang, Joe Batley, Bryan Voigt and Vipul Chaturvedi delivered presentations this week at the APS March Meeting in Boston.
1/17/19: Group members Joe Batley and Justin Watts delivered presentations this week at the MMM/Intermag Joint Conference, in Washington DC.
12/6/2017: Congratulations to PhD students Bryan Voigt and Jeff Walter, runners-up in the 2017 DOW SISCA Sustainability Challenge! They presented the work they've done developing pyrite FeS2 as a earth-abundant, low-cost solar material. Check out more details here!
12/11/2017: Research on superconductors carried out by the Center for Quantum Materials (CQM), a collaborative research team Chris and several students in the group are a part of, was recently featured by the University of Minnesota's Office of the Vice President for Research.
11/7/2017: Two graduate students in the Leighton group, Bryan Voigt and Jeff Walter, have been selected as finalists in the DOW SISCA Sustainability Innovation Award, a University-wide competition "recognizing the work of graduate students with innovative ideas and research that encourages and promotes sustainable solutions to the world’s most pressing environmental problems". They will participate in the final round of the competition in December. Check it out here!
8/15/17: The Leighton Group has an opening for a post-doctoral researcher. The position will deal with complex oxide bulk crystals and heterostructures, specifically titanates and cobaltites, with a strong emphasis on neutron scattering. Interested applicants should contact Chris Leighton at "[email protected]".
4/21/2017: Chris presented at the Materials Research Society (MRS) Spring 2017 Meeting on recent work from the group resolving the "Doping Puzzle" in pyrite (FeS2).
4/3/17: Chris has recently been appointed as inaugural Editor of the newest addition to the American Physical Society family of journals, Physical Review Materials. This will be a broad scope multidisciplinary journal that fills a gap in the APS portfolio, providing a high quality publication and reference source to the expanding community of physicists, materials scientists, chemists and engineers working in the area of materials research. The first call for papers for Phys. Rev. Materials will be released very shortly, with the first papers being published this summer. More information about the journal can be found here.
3/13/17: Eric, Koustav, Jeff, and Helin presented this week at the APS March meeting in New Orleans, LA.
2/20/2017: Chris delivered an invited talk today at the FTAPS 2017 Conference in the United Arab Emirates.
2/10/2017: Chris and Eray Aydil's Xcel Energy RDF Award on Pyrite had an external review, with Colin Wolden (Colorado School of Mines) and Dimitrios Maroudas (U. Massachussets Amherst) visiting. Chris, Eray, Jeff, and Bryan all presented.
1/12/2017: Chris gave the Condensed Matter Physics Seminar at the Ohio State University this week, speaking about electrolyte gating of complex oxides.