Country of origin: Venezuela
Subject: Physics
Matriculation year: 2015
My PhD work:
Materials can vary wildly in how well they conduct electricity. Even in good conducting metals, such as copper, the flow of electrons is “disordered”, causing them to lose energy as they move. But there’s a specific type of materials, called superconductors, which can conduct electricity perfectly when they are cooled below a specific critical temperature. The way this works is dramatically different from the way regular metals conduct electricity, and it’s not fully understood.
Superconductors are already being used in many applications, such as MRI machines. However, they’re somewhat limited by the fact that their critical temperatures are often very low, usually below -200 C. This means that they require complicated and expensive cryogenic systems to function. However, there’s some evidence that new materials could become superconducting at temperatures closer to room temperature, opening the door to many potential applications.
My PhD is focused on a type of superconductors characterized by a copper-oxide layer. These materials can be chemically tuned between two extremes to get dramatically different behaviours. Because of this we divide their phase diagram into two regimes: overdoped and underdoped. Although much could be learned by comparing the two regimes, the difficulty, and sometimes chemical constraint, to produce pristine overdoped samples have so far impeded this comparison. In my research I use anvil pressure cells to access the overdoped regime of copper superconductors and gain information on the normal state that precedes superconductivity with the help of high magnetic fields.
My undergraduate degree:
I completed a Licentiate at the Central University of Venezuela, Caracas. This is a 5 year degree which is usually comparable to an undergraduate plus Masters’ degree. I majored in Physics, which a specialization in experimental physics. After that I started my PhD in Physics at the University of Cambridge.