University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Disordered, Ordered, Magnetic, Artificial, and Interacting Nanomaterials. We study functional materials where nanoscale structure, magnetic order, topology, and scattering measurements reveal new behavior.
Led by Dustin A. Gilbert, Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.
What we do
DOMAIN Lab studies functional behavior in magnetic, nanoscale, topological, complex, and biologically derived materials. Our work connects synthesis, advanced scattering, magnetometry, transport, microscopy, and modeling to understand how order, disorder, geometry, and interactions shape material properties.
DOMAIN stands for Disordered, Ordered, Magnetic, Artificial, and Interacting Nanomaterials. The name reflects a broad materials portfolio unified by magnetism, nanoscale structure, and neutron/X-ray scattering.
See the research neighborhoods →Research neighborhoods
Nanomagnetism
Magnetic skyrmions are chiral magnetic textures in which the magnetic moments wrap into a continuous loop, with the magnetization at the core and perimeter oriented in opposite out-of-plane directions. This unusual magnetic structure gives the skyrmion topological protection, meaning it cannot be continuously deformed into a different topological class without a discontinuous event.
Methods
Neutron and X-ray scattering are central to the lab because they provide information that is difficult or impossible to obtain with conventional probes. Neutrons are sensitive to both structure and magnetism, penetrate deeply into materials, and can resolve buried interfaces and nanoscale magnetic textures.
Quantum interfaces
Topological and quantum materials exhibit properties that are governed by electronic structure, symmetry, and interfaces. In these systems, surfaces and buried boundaries can host electronic states with coupled spin, charge, and momentum behavior.
Non-volatile materials control
Controlling material properties with voltage offers a route toward on-demand functional materials: magnets, electronic states, optical response, thermal response, and superconducting behavior could in principle be switched or tuned electrically.
Materials discovery
High-entropy alloys and oxides contain multiple principal elements distributed across a lattice. This creates broad distributions in atomic mass, radius, electronegativity, spin, and bonding, which can strongly perturb electronic, magnetic, structural, and thermal behavior.
Architected materials
Metallic nanowires can be woven or assembled into low-density structures similar to nanoscale bird nests. These scaffolds combine very low density with enormous surface-area-to-volume ratio and the intrinsic functionality of metals.
Magnetism in living systems
This work started with a deceptively simple question: honeybees are magnetic, but what about the rest of the bees? That question opened a research direction connecting nanomagnetism, organismal biology, ecology, phylogeny, and magnetoreception.
News
The lab, with collaborators in ecology and evolutionary biology, published a broad survey showing that ferromagnetic signatures are widespread across bee species and connected to phylogeny, natural history, and sociality.
UT’s Tickle College of Engineering highlighted the bee magnetism collaboration and the unusual path from a dinner-table question to a Science Advances publication.
The lab received a DOE award using neutron scattering to investigate skyrmion heterostructures, extending the group’s long-running effort to resolve three-dimensional magnetic structure in thin-film systems.
Time-resolved SANS measurements revealed formation and destruction mechanisms in skyrmion lattices across multiple B20 materials.
Recognition from the Neutron Scattering Society of America for science enabled by neutron scattering.
Dustin Gilbert was promoted to tenured Associate Professor in Materials Science and Engineering at UTK.
Grazing-incidence small-angle neutron scattering and polarized neutron reflectometry were used to determine the three-dimensional structure of hybrid magnetic skyrmions.
The lab received a DOE Early Career Award to develop neutron and X-ray approaches for chiral magnetic structures.
People and place
