Front Quad of Lincoln College, the walls covered in bright green ivy

Professor Radu Coldea

Professor Radu Coldea

  • Walter Stern Fellow in Physics
  • Professor in Condensed Matter Physics

Profile

I am a Fellow of Lincoln College and a Professor in the Condensed Matter Physics Department at Oxford. Before joining Lincoln in 2008, I was a Lecturer in Physics at the University of Bristol, having previously been an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow. I also held postdoctoral research positions in the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (USA) and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, after my Oxford DPhil (PhD).

College teaching

I teach Thermal and Statistical Physics, and Condensed Matter Physics.

Research

My research involves the use of neutron and advanced x-ray scattering techniques to probe the structure and dynamics in complex magnetic materials with the aim to understand emergent phenomena that arise from quantum correlation effects between strongly interacting electrons. In 2008 I was awarded the B.T.M. Willis prize for neutron scattering from the Institute of Physics and the Faraday Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry for 'fundamental research into quantum properties of novel materials'.

Select publications

Quantum criticality in an Ising chain: experimental evidence for emergent E8 symmetry, R. Coldea, D.A. Tennant, E.M. Wheeler, E. Wawrzynska, D. Prabhakaran, M. Telling, K. Habicht, P. Smeibidl, K. Kiefer, Science 327, 2010, 177, doi: 10.1126/science.1180085.

Noncoplanar and Counterrotating Incommensurate Magnetic Order Stabilized by Kitaev Interactions in Li2IrO3, A. Biffin, R. D. Johnson, I. Kimchi, R. Morris, A. Bombardi, J. G. Analytis, A. Vishwanath, R. Coldea, Physical Review Letters 113, 2014 197201, doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.197201, https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.113.197201.

Quasiparticle Breakdown and Spin Hamiltonian of the Frustrated Quantum Pyrochlore Yb2Ti2O7 in Magnetic Field, J.D. Thompson, P.A. McClarty, D. Prabhakaran, I. Cabrera, T. Guidi, R. Coldea, Physical Review Letters 119, 2017 057203, doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.057203.

Spin waves and electronic interactions in La2CuO4, R. Coldea, S.M. Hayden, G. Aeppli, T.G. Perring, C.D. Frost, T.E. Mason, S.W. Cheong, Z. Fisk, Physical Review Letters 86, 2001 5377, doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.86.5377.

Experimental realization of a 2D fractional quantum spin liquid, R. Coldea, D.A. Tennant, A.M. Tsvelik, Z. Tylczynski, Physical Review Letters 6, 2001 1335, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.86.1335.