Research Team Alumni

Claire Pinvidic

Visiting M1 Student (ENS, Lyon)

Evan M. Smith

PhD Student

Evan’s PhD research focused on providing an experimental study of the insulating cerium-based pyrochlore Ce2Zr2O7, using neutron scattering and complimentary experimental techniques to elucidate and study a quantum spin ice phase near absolute zero temperature in Ce2Zr2O7. The magnetic Ce3+ ions in Ce2Zr2O7’s pyrochlore crystal structure occupy a sublattice of corner-sharing tetrahedra that is an archetype for magnetic frustration, and this magnetic frustration aids in promoting exotic magnetic phenomena. In particular, quantum spin ice is a rare type of magnetic phase in which the spins fluctuate in a quantum-entangled manner down to the lowest obtainable temperatures, with spin disorder that resembles the proton disorder in water ice, and with a wealth of interesting physics that accompanies this quantum disorder.

Evan was awarded the 2024 Outstanding Student Research Prize from the Neutron Scattering Society of America and the APS Outstanding Dissertation in Magnetism Award for 2024 for his thesis work. He is presently a postdoctoral fellow at ETH, Zurich in Switzerland, working with Prof. Andrey Zeludev.

Devin Burke

Postdoctoral Fellow

Devin is now a research software scientist at the German Electron Synchrotron, DESY, specializing in scientific controls and instrumentation. DESY, short for Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, is a national research centre for fundamental science located in Hamburg and Zeuthen near Berlin in Germany.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/devin-burke-b9a230126/

Symphony Huang

MSc Student

Symphony’s thesis work with Bruce is based on a trio of quasi 2D triangular quantum magnets: ErMgGaO4, YbMgGaO4, and YbCoGaO4. Her work revealed the magnetic ground state of ErMgGaO4, which is characterized by two competing interactions, resulting in this magnet’s spin glass nature. During her time in Bruce’s group, Symphony worked on material synthesis using both solid-state and floating-zone techniques, preparing phase-pure powders and growing 2g of single crystal YbCoGaO4. She also used both Monte Carlo simulations and traditional LS fitting techniques to analyze the neutron scattering data from her experiments. She participated in many conferences and neutron scattering experiments which brought her to research facilities around the world.

Symphony now works as a Material Characterization Specialist at Svante Technologies. Svante is a green-tech company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, that makes carbon capture filters and machines to remove CO2 from industrial emissions and from the air. Symphony is one of the microscopists within their R&D department, responsible for the scanning electron microscope (SEM) and the X-ray microscope (XRM). She is responsible for developing new methods and capabilities on the microscopes in the context of sorbent research, as well as maintenance and daily operations.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/symphony-huang-1bb03aa9

Hunter Sharron

Undergraduate Research Student

Qianli (Kyle) Ma

PhD Student

Kyle’s interest during his PhD was investigating the interplay between magnetic ordering and superconductivity in a series of copper-based high-temperature superconductors, famously known as cuprates. Using various neutron and X-ray scattering experimental techniques, he systematically characterized the evolution of the 2D stripe order and its relationship with superconductivity in the La-214 family of superconductors. The analysis suggests that the 2D magnetic order is more robust than previously believed, extending well beyond the quantum critical point and enveloping the entirety of the superconducting dome.
After his PhD, Kyle joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory(ORNL) as a postdoc working on a series of Shastry-Sutherland materials and modeling their exchange interactions based on inelastic neutron data. Kyle recently started as a research software scientist at ORNL, developing the next generation of neutron reduction and analysis software for various beamlines.

https://www.kyleqianlima.com/

Patrick Clancy

PhD Student and Postdoctoral Fellow

Pat was involved in a wide variety of research projects during his time with the group, performing x-ray and neutron measurements on materials ranging from low dimensional and geometrically frustrated magnetic systems to high temperature superconductors and heavy fermion materials.

As a graduate student, Pat’s thesis work has focused on the magnetic and structural properties of quasi-one-dimensional materials, such as the spin-Peierls compounds TiOBr and TiOCl, and quasi-two-dimensional materials, such as the stacked quantum magnets NaNiO2 and LiNiO2.

After graduation, Pat completed a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto with Prof. Young-June Kim. He went on to hold a teaching position at Trent University, before returning to McMaster as a postdoctoral fellow to work on the development of the neutron scattering facilities at the McMaster Nuclear Reactor. He has been awarded the John Charles Polanyi Prize in Physics and the Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award.

Pat is currently an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Physics & Astronomy at McMaster. You can read more about his new research group here:

https://clancyscattering.weebly.com/

Zack Cronkwright

MSc Student

Dalini Maharaj

PhD Student

Dalini’s primary research interests were based on neutron and X-ray scattering studies on frustrated systems which exhibit a variety of exotic behaviour. Her research interests was not limited to frustrated systems as some of her work with colleague Katharina, involved a study of the family of chromates, which form spin dimer systems and their low lying spin wave excitations and the effect of disorder. She conducted X-ray studies studies along with her colleague Edwin, on an organic spin liquid compound, k-(BEDT-TTF)2Cu2(CN)3. She was also involved in work involving the pyrochlores, specifically stuffed Tb2+xTi2-xO7+y to investigate the effect of stuffing on their physical properties.

Jiahe Deng

Undergraduate Research Student