About me

I am a PhD candidate under the supervision of Prof. Julie Staunton and working alongside postdoctoral researcher Dr. Christopher Patrick, using computational methods to study the temperature dependence of magnetostriction.

Magnetostriction is a phenomenon seen in all ferromagnets to varying extents, where they stretch and deform under the application of a magnetic field. For a number of decades now, extroadinarily magnetostrictive materials such as Terfenol-D and Galfenol have been utilised in extracting mechanical work from the input of electrical signals in highly precise ways. This includes applications such as sonar, fuel injection and even commercial devices like the Soundbug, a computer mouse-sized object that can turn any hard surface into an audio speaker.

For magnetostrictive materials to be widely applicable it is necessary to understand how they respond to changes in temperature. Our computational methods represent the first time that magnetostriction can be studied at non-zero temperatures, entirely from first principles (in other words, no assumptions have to be made about the intrinsic properties of the material).

My published work is focused on pure iron and Galfenol, relatively straightforward materials to model, but we have now moved on to tackling Terfenol-D which presents a significant theoretical challenge due to the presence of highly localised 4f-electrons.

Prior to researching at Warwick I earned a a first class MSci degree in Theoretical physics at The University of Birmingham.

Publications

Ab initio calculations of temperature-dependent magnetostriction of Fe and $A2{\mathrm{Fe}}_{1-x}{\mathrm{Ga}}_x$ within the disordered local moment picture

George A. Marchant, Christopher E. Patrick, and Julie B. Staunton

https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.99.054415

Courses taken

PX425 - High Performance Computing in Physics

EX0 - Probes of Condensed Matter

SPRKKR Workshop at Daresbury Laboratory

Physics by the Lake 2018

Teaching duties

First year lab demonstrator

George Marchant

Email: g.marchant@warwick.ac.uk

I can be found in office PS001 (Physical Sciences Building, ground floor).