Home Faculty Advisor: Professor Akshay Rao, Department of Physics, University of Cambridge
Host Faculty Advisor: Professor Felix Fisher, Department of Chemistry, UC Berkeley
Arjun is currently undertaking his PhD studies at the University of Cambridge supported by a Winton Scholarship, supervised by Dr. Akshay Rao and Dr. Bertomeu Monserrat at the Department of Physics. His PhD topic is on the influence disorder on transport properties of semiconductors. Arjun’s host at UCB is Professor Felix R. Fischer, Department of Physics and Kavli ENSI. His Winton-Berkeley exchange project will be to explore how room-temperature intrinsic ferromagnetic semiconductors offer a viable route to non-volatile digital logic. This type of logic is where states can be held without the help of an external driving voltage, drastically lowering the power consumption of electronic circuits. Arjun’s work in Cambridge has revealed that two-dimensional nanoribbons of black phosphorous hold great promise in this area, via optically-addressable edge magnetism which is robust to disorder. Using Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy (STM) at UC Berkeley, Arjun will investigate the microscopic nature of edge magnetism in this system.