Senior Lecturer in Condensed Matter Theory

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Biographical information

I received my Physics education at the University of Salamanca in my native Spain (Licenciado, 1992-1997) and at the University of Bristol (PhD, 1997-2001) where I completed a thesis on unconventional superconductors under the supervision of the late Balazs L. Gyorffy. I then moved to Brazil, where I held a postdoctoral position in the University of Sao Paulo at Sao Carlos (2002) and worked with Luiz Oliveira and Klaus Capelle on proximity effects in superconductors and with Vivaldo L. Campo on electronic statates in small-world networks. One year later I moved back to the U.K. to take up a research fellowship at the University of Birmingham (2003-2005).

In Birmingham I started new collaborations with my supervisor Andy Schofield, with Chris Hooley and, later, with Sam Carr. During this time my research interests broadened further to include quantum liquid crystal states and the Pomeranchuk instability and ultra-cold atoms.

After Birmingham, I took up the Atlas Research Fellowship in Condensed Matter Theory at the ISIS Facility in the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, in Harwell, and at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford (2005-2010). At RAL I developed a keen interest in extending, through my theoretical research, the capabilities of large-scale facilities employed in condensed matter research, including the muon and neutron instruments at the ISIS spallation neutron source.

During my career I have been an Individual Marie Curie Fellow; a Fellow of St. Catherine’s College, Oxford; and an honorary research associate of the London Centre for Nanotechnology. I also chaired SEPnet’s Atomic and Condensed Matter research theme (07/2010-02/2012) and I am a founding member of the Hubbard Theory Consortium.

Research Interests

I am a theorist working on quantum condensed matter and materials physics. Within this broad area, I have contributed to a number of problems spanning superconductivity, strong correlations, ultracold gases and complex networks.

My current interests include broken time-reversal symmetry in centrosymmetric and non-centrosymmetric superconductors, topological defects and excitations in condensed matter and experimental signatures of quantum entanglement in magnetic materials.

The range of topics is quite broad and often cuts across sub-disciplines. A wide range of techniques are deployed as the need arises: semiclassics, BCS theory, numerical diagonalisation, Bethe ansatz-based techniques, density functional theory, bosonisation, group theory, variational methods, etc. Much of the work is carried out in close collaboration with experimentalists, particularly those carrying out work that benefits from the use of large-scale facilities such as neutron, muon and synchrotron X-ray sources.

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