Dr. Victor Lopez Dominguez has been awarded with the fellowship of Doctor of Excellence from CIDEGenT program in the area of Material Science and Technology. Dr. Lopez’s grant is one of the three research positions in the last call of the GenT program offer by the Generalitat of Valencia joining the University Jaume I, and one of the two researchers joining the Institute of Advanced Materials.
Dr. Lopez ‘s current position is a senior postdoctoral fellow in the Physical Electronics Research Laboratory in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Northwestern University (Chicago, USA), directed by Professor Khalili. His research has been focused on the electrical manipulation of antiferromagnetic materials for ultra-fast memory devices, as well as in the development of new material stacks for low power consumption magnetic tunnel junctions, spin diodes for self-powered devices and field free switching ferrimagnetic devices. Previous to his current position, Dr. Lopez got his PhD at the University of Barcelona in the group Professor Javier Tejada in 2014, where he studied magnetic nanoparticles and developed new high frequency applications in the ranges of the microwaves and the THz frequencies. From 2014 to 2017, he was a postdoc researcher in the Institute of Applied Magnetism at University Complutense of Madrid under the supervision of Professor Antonio Hernando. In this period, his research projects were focused on tunable magnetic metamaterials as well as the interaction between magnetic materials and microwaves.
Dr. Lopez’s future work at the INAM will continue his research in spin electronics (spintronics) to combine the spin and charge degrees of freedom of the electron to store, transport and process information. Spintronics is one of the most promising technologies because of its compatibility with current CMOS architectures. Besides, the natural dynamics of magnetic materials, occurring from the nanosecond to the picosecond time scale, enables high-speed devices with a long endurance. Recently, Dr. Lopez last study demonstrated new spintronic device concepts to implement unconventional computing paradigms like brain inspired, and probabilistic computing in addition of ultrafast memoricentric architectures. The study of magnetic materials that Dr. Lopez will conduct is aligned with the strategic research lines that the INAM and the UJI is currently working on and will open new routes for the development of the future computing technologies.
The granted project will study new materials and physical phenomena occurring in magnetic materials to design and implement new device concepts such as memristors to store synaptic weights or ultrafast neurons that can be introduced in monocyclic way in CMOS circuits. The novel developed materials will not only enrich the current landscape of devices for future computing applications, but also will explore hot topics, such as topology in magnetic materials, and spin waves and magnetic textures for non-charge based computation.
