Our Ph.D. student Dávid Hovančík was awarded the Milan Odehnal Prize (2nd place) for his contribution to the investigating two-dimensional orbital magnetism in van der Waals systems. Dávid succeeded in the competition with his work published in Nano Letters, J. Phys. Chem. Letters, and Phys. Rev. B.
The main outcome of David’s research studies is discovering a large unquenched orbital moment of vanadium 3d states in VI3. This van der Waals material represents a 2D honeycomb magnetic lattice analogous to a graphene electronic lattice. The unfrozen orbital degree of freedom in VI3 originates from a special electron occupation V3+ (3d2) in combination with proper crystal field symmetry and spin-orbit coupling, as described in the publications. Apriori, its presence results in strong entanglement of the spin-orbit many-body wave function. Due to that, VI3 exhibits a strong magneto-crystalline anisotropy, significant magneto-elastic coupling, and THz energy range magnons usually observed only in antiferromagnets. In addition, David’s research scope has included, yet, another material VBr3, which shows Ising-like antiferromagnetism with out-of-plane magnetic moments and the unique tricriticality in metamagnetic phase diagram. The results on this subject were published in the PRB paper receiving "PRB Editors' suggestion", as annonced earlier.
Honorable Mention was in addition given to our another colleague, Petr Král for his study of magnetism and structure in frustrated tetragonal R2T2In intermetallics with application of pressure.
The Milan Odehnal Prize is awarded by the Czech Physical Society every two years to young authors of scientific papers from the field of physics for their exceptional contribution to their branch of physics. Dávid and Petr joined our collegues who successfully represented our faculty and our department in this competition in the past (M.Vališka in 2018, M.Kratochvílová in 2016, J.Kaštil in 2014, J.Rusz in 2006, J.Vejpravová in 2004).
We congratulate to our great colleagues!
