Professor, School of Physics and Astronomy
Biography
Peter Wahl is a Professor of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy. He graduated with a diploma in Physics in 2001 after studying at the Universities of Bonn and Lausanne. Peter went on to pursue a PhD degree in Physics at the Max Planck Institute of Solid State Research in Stuttgart, and graduated in 2005. After stays in Aarhus in Denmark and, with a Feodor-Lynen fellowship, at Cornell University in the US, he returned to Germany, where he was awarded and led an independent research group at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, developing advanced low temperature microscopes to study quantum materials. In 2012, he was appointed as a Reader in Experimental Condensed Matter Physics at the University of St Andrews. Since 2018, he is a Professor and Director of Research of the School of Physics and Astronomy. His research aims to identify new materials for future information technologies, by using atomic-scale imaging and spectroscopy to understand their properties and enable controlling them. The group has developed and now operates a suite of bespoke instrumentation that provides microscopic insights into the electronic states in these materials, with the aim to make them amenable for new, more energy-efficient, technologies.
Selected publications
Carolina A. Marques, M. Saeed Bahramy, Christopher Trainer, Igor Marković, Matthew D. Watson, Federico Mazzola, Akhil Rajan, Timothy D. Raub, Phil D.C. King, and Peter Wahl, Tomographic mapping of the hidden dimension in quasi-particle interference, Nat. Commun. 12, 6739 (2021)
C. Trainer, C.M. Yim, C. Heil, L.S. Farrar, V. Tsurkan, A. Loidl, and P. Wahl, Probing magnetic exchange interactions with Helium, Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 166803 (2021)
Carolina A. Marques, Luke C. Rhodes, Rosalba Fittipaldi, Veronica Granata, Chi Ming Yim, Renato Buzio, Andrea Gerbi, Antonio Vecchione, Andreas W. Rost, Peter Wahl, Magnetic-field tunable intertwined checkerboard charge order and nematicity in the surface layer of Sr2RuO4, Adv. Mat. 33, 2100593 (2021)
Chi-Ming Yim, Christopher Trainer, Ramakrishna Aluru, Shun Chi, Walter N. Hardy, Ruixing Liang, Doug Bonn, and Peter Wahl, Discovery of a strain-stabilized smectic electronic order in LiFeAs, Nat. Commun. 9, 2602 (2018)
M. Enayat, Z. Sun, U. R. Singh, R. Aluru, S. Schmaus, A. Yaresko, Y. Liu, C. Lin, V. Tsurkan, A. Loidl, J. Deisenhofer, and P. Wahl, Real Space Imaging of the Atomic-Scale Magnetic Structure of Fe1+yTe, Science 345, 653 (2014)
