PhD Studentship: Probing The Local Structure of Functional Materials Under High Pressure

Supervisor: Dr Mark Senn and Dr Nick Funnell                       

Funding availability: A fully-funded stipend with home/Eu fees for 3.5 years is available starting October 2023. Applicants that are not from the UK/EU are welcome to apply, but they will need to find additional funding for the full Band 2 Postgraduate Research fees (https://warwick.ac.uk/services/academicoffice/finance/fees/pgr/).           

Project description: 

This is a joint collaborative project between the University of Warwick and the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source. ISIS is a world-leading facility for studying the atomic-level structure of materials that attracts over 3000 external researchers each year from over 30 different countries. The project will develop cutting-edge approaches for exploring how the structures of functional materials change under application of high pressures. A particular emphasis of the project will be to develop new methods that allow total scattering data of crystalline solids to be measured at pressures up to 10 GPa (ca. 100,000 times atmospheric pressure), in combination with state-of-the-art instrumentation available on the PEARL beamline at ISIS. Using innovative approaches we have developed, to both correct and model the resulting pairwise distribution functions, you will distil mechanistic insights on the local distortions that dictate a variety of technologically-relevant properties such as ferroelectricity, thermoelectricity and negative thermal expansion. The insights you derive will help enable the next generation of enhanced functional materials to be developed. As part of your research project you will spend a significant period of time working at ISIS, in Oxfordshire, as well as having opportunities to visit our other collaborators at other central facilities in Grenoble, France.  During the course of your PhD you will have multiple opportunities to present your work at international conferences. You will join a lively team of 3 postdocs and 5 other PhD students as we seek to understand the fundamental mechanisms behind phenomena as varied as magnetism, magnetoresistance, negative thermal expansion, ferroelectricity, and superconductivity. More details of our research can be found at www.senngroup.com and https://www.isis.stfc.ac.uk.

Requirements:

Applicants should have an honours degree (at least II.1 or equivalent) in chemistry, physics, or material sciences.

How to apply:

Interested applicants should contact Dr Mark Senn (m.senn@warwick.ac.uk) and Dr Nick Funnell (nick.funnell@stfc.ac.uk) with a CV at the earliest possible instance.

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