©Maxime Leroux.
Published on May 16, 2022.
LNCMI Toulouse.
After my undergraduate years and the agrégation and master in physics from the ENS Lyon, I completed my PhD at the Institute Néel in Grenoble (CNRS and Université de Grenoble). There, I studied superconductors and charge density wave materials with Drs. Pierre Rodière and Klaus Hasselbach. I stayed in science as a postdoctoral researcher, first at Argonne National Lab in Chicago, then at the MagLab pulsed field facility in Los Alamos (USA). There, I kept working on superconductors and charge density wave materials, which have electronic properties of fundamental interest, but I also ventured into more applied topics such as high-temperature superconducting (HTS) tapes and novel magnetic skyrmion materials. My current projects still revolve around high-temperature superconductors and charge density waves. For instance, I use focused ion beams to structure single-crystalline materials into micrometer-sized samples with nanometer precision, which removes many technical roadblocks to perform experiments at very high pulsed magnetic fields, thus opening up a vast number of new possibilities. In my current position, I enjoy performing cutting-edge research on world-class high-field magnets, all the while having the opportunity to meet leading researchers from all over the world thanks to my local-contact activities. I also enjoy the serendipity of science, these “eureka moments” when it just clicks, for instance at the time when I realized that only the data at peak magnetic field was making any sense because, elsewhere, there was an as-yet-unknown contribution from the rate of change of magnetic field. For the future, I am looking forward to developing new experimental setups for measurements at very high pulsed magnetic fields up to 100 T and beyond, which may enable to unlock some secrets of high-temperature superconductivity and contribute to the development of applied superconductors.
