Jan Masell has successfully secured funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and will establish an Emmy Noether Research Group at the Institute for Theoretical Solid-State Physics. His group will focus on the “Design and Functionalization of Three-Dimensional Magnetic Textures,” or “MAGN3D” for short.

Recent breakthroughs in the development of experimental imaging techniques have provided the first insights into genuinely three-dimensional (3D) magnetic textures hidden inside complex magnets. These textures can vary in all three spatial dimensions and include, in particular, topological skyrmion strings and hopfions.

This development paves the way for a new era of magnetism research, requiring a concerted effort between experiment and theory to explore and understand these novel magnetic structures. The Emmy Noether Research Group will address these challenges from a theoretical perspective in close collaboration with experimental partners in the United States, Japan, Norway, and Germany.

In particular, the interpretation and analysis of experimental imaging data will require novel AI-assisted reconstruction algorithms to be developed by MAGN3D. The research group will investigate stabilization mechanisms to predict and design novel magnetic textures, analyze their dynamics in three spatial dimensions, and propose possible scenarios for their functionalization.

MAGN3D will make an important contribution to the emerging field of three-dimensional magnetism, which holds considerable promise for both fundamental research and future applications in information technology.

The Emmy Noether Research Group will be funded for a period of 3 + 3 years with a total budget of approximately €2.4 million.