Professor Simon Bending
Biographical Information
Lecturer/Senior Lecturer/Reader/Professor, University of Bath 11/89-present
Post-Doc, Max Planck Institut FKF, Stuttgart 10/86-11/89
Post-Doc, IBM Research Laboratories, Zürich 10/85-10/86
Ph.D. (Stanford University) 1985
BA Hons. (Cambridge University) 1979
Research Interests
My current research focusses on understanding the magnetic properties of superconducting and ferromagnetic materials at the nanoscale. This work utilises a range of state-of-the-art Hall probe magnetic imaging and nanomagnetometry systems which have been developed in Bath over the last decade, including a new 300mK scanning Hall microscope. The research is made possible through access to the Departmental suite of class 1000 clean rooms equipped with high resolution electron beam lithography, wet and dry etching and various deposition systems. Recent work in the area of vortex matter in superconductors has focussed on the crossing lattices regime in strongly anisotropic High Tc single crystals under tilted fields as well as spontaneous vortex-antivortex ‘molecules’ in superconducting films containing arrays of strong moment ferromagnetic dots. Work on ferromagnetic materials is centered on FIB irradiation of Co/Pt multilayers to realise artificial domain structures, and studying domain wall resistance and current-driven domain wall motion in them. We are also investigating the magnetic properties of electrodeposited mesoscopic superconducting and ferromagnetic crystals as well as spin-charge textures in hybrid superconductor-dilute magnetic semiconductor structures.
Selected publications
- Competing symmetries and broken bonds in superconducting vortex-antivortex molecular crystals, J.S.Neal, M.V.Milosevic, S.J.Bending, A.Potenza, L. San Emeterio and C.H.Marrows, Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 127001 (2007).
- Angular Dependence of Domain Wall Resistivity in Artificial Magnetic Domain Structures, A.Aziz, S.J.Bending, H.G.Roberts, S.Crampin, P.J.Heard, and C.H.Marrows, Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 206602 (2006).
- Ratchet without spatial asymmetry for controlling the motion of magnetic flux quanta using time-asymmetric drives, David Cole, Simon Bending, Sergey Savel’ev, Alexander Grigorenko, Tsuyoshi Tamegai & Franco Nori, Nature Materials 5, 305 (2006).
- Vortex Chains in Anisotropic Superconductors, Simon J. Bending and Matthew J. W. Dodgson, J. Phys. Condens. Matter 17, R1-R39 (2005). Invited Topical Review.
- Tilt of Pancake Vortex Stacks in Layered Superconductors in the Crossing Lattices Regime, A.N.Grigorenko, S.J.Bending, I.V.Grigorieva, A.E.Koshelev, T.Tamagei and S.Ooi, Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 067001 (2005).
- Symmetry Locking and Commensurate Vortex Domain Formation in Periodic Pinning Arrays, A.N.Grigorenko, S.J. Bending, M.J.Van Bael, M.Lange, V.V.Moshchalkov, H.Fangohr and P.A.J.de Groot, Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 237001 (2003).
- Visualization of Interacting Crossing Vortex Lattices in the Presence of Quenched Disorder, A.N.Grigorenko, S.J.Bending, A.E.Koshelev, John.R.Clem , T.Tamegai and S.Ooi, Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 217003 (2002).
- Observation of a New One-Dimensional Chain State of Vortex Matter, A.N.Grigorenko, S.J.Bending, T.Tamegai, S.Ooi and M.Henini, Nature 414, 728 (2001)