Solveig Felton joined the Centre for Nanostructured Media as a lecturer in 2013. She has a broad background in magnetic materials, having used a wide range of different materials characterisation techniques. Currently her interests are focused on nanomagnetism, studying magnetic domain structures using techniques such as Magnetic Force Microscopy (MFM) and Lorentz Transmission Electron Microscopy (LTEM). Solveig obtained an MSc in Materials Engineering from Uppsala University, Sweden in 2001, and a PhD in Solid State Physics from the same university in 2005 with a thesis entitled Tunable Magnetic Properties of Transition Metal Compounts. After a post doc in the EPR and Diamond group of the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick she moved to the Department of Materials at Imperial College London in August 2009 as a post doc working on Molecular Spintronics in Sandrine Heutz's group. In 2011 she took on a temporary lectureship in the same department, using LTEM to study micromagnetic states in primarily artificial spin ice systems.

A multi-microscopy approach shows that local heterogeneous electron-transfer rates at conducting diamond electrodes correlate with the local density of electronic states. This model of electroactivity is of considerable value for the rational design of conducting diamond electrochemical technologies, and also provides key general insights on electrode structure controls in electrochemical kinetics.

Angewandte Chemie International Edition Volume 51, Issue 28, pages 7002–7006, July 9, 2012 DOI: 10.1002/anie.201203057

The negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy centre in diamond is an attractive candidate for applications that range from magnetometry to quantum information processing. In a paper published in Physical Review B we show that only a fraction of the nitrogen (typically <0.5%) incorporated during homoepitaxial diamond growth by chemical vapour deposition (CVD) is in the form of undecorated nitrogen-vacancy centre. Furthermore, studies on CVD diamond grown on (110)-oriented substrates show a near 100% preferential orientation of nitrogen-vacancy centres along only the two <111> directions pointing out of the growth plane. The results indicate that nitrogen-vacancy centres grow in as units, as the diamond is deposited, rather than by migration and association of their components. Reducing the number of NV orientations from four orientations to two orientations should lead to increased optically detected magnetic resonance contrast and thus improved magnetic sensitivity in ensemble-based magnetometry.

PHYSICAL REVIEW B Volume: 86 Issue: 3 Article Number: 035201 DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.86.035201