Dr Terada spent two years at ISIS as a visiting scientist working on a high pressure study of magnetic materials using WISH, a long-wavelength diffractometer in the second target station at ISIS. He received his prize at a ceremony in Japan, on 10th December 2015.
Dr Terada has been working in the area of multiferroics for many years. In some of these materials, magnetism and electric polarization can be strongly coupled, which is a highly desirable property for potential applications due the nature of their complex magnetic structures.
Most magnetic materials exhibit rather simple magnetic structures because the interactions between a spin and its neighbours all tend to favour a single type of order. However, this is no longer the case when, for example, frustration is present in the delicate balance of interactions, which can lead to complex magnetic structures.
These interactions can be tuned by applying pressure, and the idea of Dr Terada’s visit to ISIS in 2011 was to study the effect of pressure on the magnetism of selected multiferroics, sometimes in parallel with applied magnetic fields.
Dr Pascal Manuel, instrument scientist for WISH, was delighted by the announcement of Dr Terada winning the Young Scientist Prize:
“The collaboration with Noriki has been extremely fruitful with half a dozen papers in high impact journals. High pressure experiments are technically challenging with small samples, and therefore small signals. The combination of Noriki's skills in the domain of high pressure and a high long wavelengths flux & low background instrument has created a unique capability to study multiferroics, or any magnetic systems for that matter, under high pressure. We are delighted that his beautiful contribution to the understanding of multiferroics through high pressure is recognized.”
