At present, the marketplace for professionals, researchers, and graduate students in solid-state physics and materials science lacks a book that presents a comprehensive discussion of ferroelectrics and related materials in a form that is suitable for experimentalists and engineers. This book proposes to present a wide coverage of domain-related issues concerning these materials. This coverage includes selected theoretical topics (which are covered in the existing literature) in addition t...

Magnetism is a strange force, mysteriously attracting one object to another apparently through empty space. It has been claimed as a great healer, with magnetic therapies being proposed over the centuries and still popular today. Why are its mysterious important to solve?In this Very Short Introduction, Stephen J. Blundell explains why. For centuries magnetism has been used for various exploits; through compasses it gave us navigation and through motors, generators, and turbines it has giv...

This text on the electrical, optical, magnetic, and thermal properties of materials stresses concepts rather than mathematical formalism. Suitable for advanced undergraduates, it is intended for materials and electrical engineers who want to gain a fundamental understanding of alloys, semiconductor devices, lasers, magnetic materials, and so forth. The book is organized to be used in a one-semester course; to that end each section of applications, after the introduction to the fundamentals...

One of the best ways to "lift the lid" on what is happening inside a given material is to study it using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Of particular interest are NMR 1/T1 relaxation rates, which measure how fast energy stored in magnetic nuclei is transferred to surrounding electrons.This thesis develops a detailed, quantitative theory of NMR 1/T1 relaxation rates, and shows for the first time how they could be used to measure the speed at which energy travels in a wide range o...

The physics of strongly interacting matter in an external magnetic field is presently emerging as a topic of great cross-disciplinary interest for particle, nuclear, astro- and condensed matter physicists.It is known that strong magnetic fields are created in heavy ion collisions, an insight that has made it possible to study a variety of surprising and intriguing phenomena that emerge from the interplay of quantum anomalies, the topology of non-Abelian gauge fields, and the magnet...

Multiobjective Shape Design in Electricity and Magnetism is entirely focused on electric and magnetic field synthesis, with special emphasis on the optimal shape design of devices when conflicting objectives are to be fulfilled. Direct problems are solved by means of finite-element analysis, while evolutionary computing is used to solve multiobjective inverse problems. This approach, which is original, is coherently developed throughout the whole manuscript. The use of game theory, dynamic...

This thesis describes a novel and robust way of deriving a Hamiltonian of the interacting boson model based on microscopic nuclear energy density functional theory. Based on the fact that the multi-nucleon induced surface deformation of finite nucleus can be simulated by effective boson degrees of freedom, observables in the intrinsic frame, obtained from self-consistent mean-field method with a microscopic energy density functional, are mapped onto the boson analog. Thereby, the excitatio...

Bringing together nanoscience with stem cell and bacterial cell biology, this thesis is truly interdisciplinary in scope. It shows that the creation of superparamagnetic nanoparticles inside a protein coat, followed by chemical functionalisation of the protein surface, provides a novel methodology for cell magnetisation using incubation times as short as one minute. Crucially, stem cell proliferation and multi-lineage differentiation capacity is not impaired after labelling. Due to the uns...

In this thesis, magnetism and transport phenomena in spin-charge coupled systems on frustrated lattices are theoretically investigated, focusing on Ising-spin Kondo lattice models and using a combination of Monte Carlo simulation and other techniques such as variational calculations and perturbation theory. The emphasis of the study is on how the cooperation of spin-charge coupling and geometrical frustration affects the thermodynamic properties of the Kondo lattice models; it presents the...

This brief reviews current research on magnetic skyrmions, with emphasis on formation mechanisms, observation techniques, and materials design strategies. The response of skyrmions, both static and dynamical, to various electromagnetic fields is also covered in detail.Recent progress in magnetic imaging techniques has enabled the observation of skyrmions in real space, as well as the analysis of their ordering manner and the details of their internal structure. In metallic systems,...

This thesis elucidates electron correlation effects in topological matter whose electronic states hold nontrivial topological properties robust against small perturbations. In addition to a comprehensive introduction to topological matter, this thesis provides a new perspective on correlated topological matter.The book comprises three subjects, in which electron correlations in different forms are considered. The first focuses on Coulomb interactions for massless Dirac fermions. Us...