Prof. Dr. Mathias Weiler

- Alumnus/Alumna: Magnetism and Spintronics
Mathias Weiler was member of the Gross group at WMI as a master and Ph.D. student, as well as a postdoctoral researcher between 2007 and 2020. From December 2012 to November 2014 he was postdoctoral researcher at National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, Colorado, supported by a DAAD stipend.
Master Thesis: Magnetization Control in Multiferroic Heterostructures (December 2007)
Ph.D. Thesis: Magnon-Phonon Interactions in Ferromagnetic Thin Films (May 2012)
Habilitation Thesis: Magnetization Dynamics and Spin Torques in exchange coupled Spin Systems (April 2019)
In his Ph.D. thesis, Mathias Weiler studied the interaction of magnons and phonons for spin current generation. He experimentally demonstrated resonant magnon-phonon interaction in the GHz frequency range by studying the magnetoelastically driven magnetization precession induced by a sound wave in ferromagnetic thin films at room temperature. Based on these findings, he experimentally demonstrated that pure spin currents can be injected from a ferromagnet into a normal metal by the resonant interaction of magnons and coherent phonons. Finally, he showed that thermal phonons due to spatially confined temperature gradients can be used to generate charge and spin currents in ferromagnetic thin films. His experiments demonstrated that these local currents depend on the local magnetization configuration. This establishes magnetothermal imaging as well as local, bipolar, magnetically controllable charge and spin current sources.
Mathias left WMI in September 2020 to become Full Professor (W3) at the Department of Physics of the University of Kaiserslautern. There he studies magnetic phenomena, aiming at novel applications. He is particularly interested in the dynamics of exchange-coupled spin systems in solids.