Dr Miriam Jaafar Ruiz-Castellanos

Miriam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) (Spain) and a researcher at the IFIMAC – Condensed Matter Physics Center (located in the campus of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) .

Her research centres on the fields of Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM), with a particular focus on developing new characterization methodologies based on Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) to understand new material’s phenomena (e.g., low dimensional effects).

Some of her most recent research utilises Magnetic Force Microscopy (MFM) to study half-hedgehog spin textures in sub-100 nm soft magnetic nanodots. This research suggests the ‘existence of a new degree of freedom to create and manipulate complex 3D spin-textures in soft magnetic nanodots’.

Dr Miriam Jaafar Ruiz-Castellanos

Recent AFM-related papers:

• Berganza, E., Jaafar, M., Fernandez-Roldan, J. A., Goiriena-Goikoetxea, M., Pablo-Navarro, J., García-Arribas, A., Guslienko, K., Magén, C., De Teresa, J. M., Chubykalo-Fesenko, O. and Asenjo, A. (2020). ‘Half-hedgehog spin textures in sub-100 nm soft magnetic nanodots’. Nanoscale, 36, pp. 18646-18653.

• Jaafar, M., Pablo-Navarro, J., Berganza, E., Ares, P., Magén, C., Masseboeuf, A., Gatel, C., Snoeck, E., Gómez-Herrero, J., María de Teresa, J. and Asenjo, A. (2020). ‘Customized MFM probes based on magnetic nanorods’. Nanoscale, 18, pp. 10090-10097.

• Berganza, E., Marqués-Marchán, J., Bran, C., Vazquez, M., Asenjo, A. and Jaafar, M. (2021). ‘Evidence of Skyrmion-Tube Mediated Magnetization Reversal in Modulated Nanowires’. Materials, 14(19), pp. 5671.

Biography: Miriam has a BS degree in Physics from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2003) and a PhD in Physics Science from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2009). From 2004, she was based in the Optical, Transport and Magnetic Properties department of the Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid (ICMM-CSIC) (Spain) where she was supervised by Dr. Agustina Asenjo.

Her research focused on the development of Variable Field Magnetic Force Microscopy (VF-MFM) used to characterise different materials like well-ordered electrodeposited nanowire arrays into the porous of anodic alumina templates, lithography nanostructures, ferromagnetic antidot arrays and magnetic thin films. Miriam also visited the IFW laboratory of Kerr Effect Microscopy in Dresden (German) during this time.

In 2009, she joined the Nanoforces group at the Condensed Matter Physics Department at UAM to carry out her postdoctoral research under the supervision of Prof. J. Gómez-Herrero. This research studied mechanical and electrical properties of carbon-based materials with a homemade Variable Temperature-Variable Pressure AFM, including highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG), graphene oxide (GO) and graphene.

Since 2018 Miriam has led several projects based on the study of the dissipation process and the application of the MFM for biological samples.

Twitter: @JrcMiriam

Website: Jaafar Ruiz-Castellanos, Miriam - Department of Condensed Matter Physics (uam.es)

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