Designing frustration: surface effects and disorder – DEFUSED

By preventing magnetic phases to order, frustration has opened a window at low temperature for unconventional and collective properties of matter. The past 30 years have seen an ever growing effort from the community of chemists and physicists to characterise these features. The field of magnetic frustration has now reached a degree of maturity which allows to go beyond material characterisation and to aim at designing purpose-oriented frustrated systems.
Our approach in this project is to use the extra degrees of freedom offered by surface effects (especially in thin films and heterostructures) and quenched disorder (e.g. via a controlled dilution) to adjust, and possibly even combine, the properties of frustrated magnets in order to model them into the desired function.