After completing my BSc (1st class Hons) at UWA, I carried out a joint-badged PhD between UWA and the Université Paris-Sud 11 in Orsay, France.
Supervised by Professor Bob Stamps and Dr Jacques Ferré, my work was focussed on using magneto-optical microscopy to study the dynamics of magnetic domain walls in ultrathin, ferromagnetic Cobalt films.
Magnetic domain walls are highly localised “twists” in the local magnetisation direction in a ferromagnet and can be moved using magnetic fields or electrical currents. There is significant interest in using domain walls for addressable data storage devices and memristors.
My PhD work tested links between general theories for elastic interface motion and magnetic domain wall dynamics in weakly disordered quasi-2D films. Post-doctoral work kept me in the Paris region where I worked in the Unité Mixte de Physique CNRS/Thales looking at dynamics, depinning and resonances of domain walls in magneto-electronic (or “spintronic”) devices using electrical current injection to probe and drive wall dynamics. I then took a short break from magnetism research in 2012, spending 6 months in Associate Professor Jennfier Curtis’ group at Georgia Tech (Atlanta, USA) working on chemical sensors based on epitaxial graphene, a trip funded by an American-Australian Association Pratt fellowship.
My current work is focused on nanomagnetic and spintronic nanoparticle detection for biomedical applications with funding from an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) and the AOARD.
Key research
- Spintronics
- Magnetisation dynamics
- Domain wall dynamics
- Magnetic nanostructures
- Magneto-opticsBiosensing
- Company:The University of Western Australia
- Short Bio:Research Fellow, School of Physics
- http://www.web.uwa.edu.au/people/peter.metaxas