Lecturer: Beena Kalisky, Department of Physics and BINA Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, Bar-Ilan University

Abstract:
Competition or cooperation between different electronic orders with similar energy scales often
gives rise to new or unexpected behaviors. Detecting traces of such orders requires versatile
probes, which can probe different aspects of the system, such as conductivity, superconductivity
and magnetism. In my talk, I will describe two systems where our local view uncovered
surprising mesoscopic effects. In the oxide interface LaAlO 3 /SrTiO 3 , we imaged the current flow
close to a metal-insulator transition. We found that the critical behavior is controlled by structural
domain patterns in the substrate, rather than by universal scaling laws. In the transition metal
dichalcogenide 4Hb-TaS 2 we show that the superconducting state hosts a spontaneous vortex
phase, where vortices appear in the absence of an external field. I will show evidence that this
spontaneous vortex phase is caused by unconventional magnetism in the normal state.