Overseas research opportunity arrives with professor's award

For Axel Hoffmann, a Founder Professor in The Grainger College of Engineering’s Materials Science and Engineering Department, his recently earned Humboldt Research Award is all about connections with other people. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation recognized him with a €60,000 financial prize, but he’s most interested in the opportunity to conduct a research project in Germany, which happens to be his homeland. 

He’s planning to embark on his overseas studies in 2026, when he will visit the Technical University of Munich - a school with a reputation as one of Germany’s top research institutions - and collaborate with Professor Christian Back, as well as with Professor Jairo Sinova from the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. While he isn’t entirely sure about the exact form this research will take, the work will involve his specialty of experimental condensed matter physics with a focus on spin-orbitronics, which is the study of magnetic moments in electrons as electronic currents flow in materials. 

Hoffmann has spent decades building a professional network in Germany. He has collaborated with many people and appreciates the lifelong contacts he has developed through his work. He is looking forward to continuing to build this network through the Humboldt organization, which often brings awardees together through its events, and expand his horizons as a result.

“I have good connections. It’s a very vibrant research community, especially in my field of research, so it’s definitely fun to have another excuse to stay well-connected,” Hoffmann said with a laugh. 

Hoffmann was nominated for the award by one of his strongest German connections in Sinova. The two men have a history through event networking and working on mutually beneficial projects.  Sinova’s letter to the Humboldt selection committee made note of Hoffmann’s decades of work regarding spin-transport and magnetization dynamics and called him a “scientific and mentoring leader to the spintronics community."

“A few years after I started to explore spin Hall effects theoretically, he was among the first to experimentally measure spin Hall effects in metallic systems by combining transport measurements with magnetization dynamics for generating spin currents via spin pumping,” Sinova’s letter said. “This key breakthrough ignited the interest in metallic spin Hall effect and its functionality as spin-torques in MRAM technologies, triggering an enormous activity within the field.”

Sinova raved about a new direction for Hoffman’s research, which involves antiferromagnetic spintronics, currently a hot topic in materials science. Antiferromagnetic spintronics focus on the manipulation and utilization of antiferromagnetic materials for data storage and processing. According to Sinova, Hoffmann was among the first to ever experimentally explore spin Hall effects in metallic antiferromagnets. 

Sinova isn’t the only person to recognize Hoffmann for his accomplished career. Hoffmann was named to the Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers list each year from 2019 to 2023. In 2022, he earned the David Adler Lectureship Award in the Field of Materials Physics from the American Physical Society. 

Hoffmann began his career as a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In 2001, he joined Argonne National Laboratory, where he started as an assistant materials scientist and rose the ranks to become  senior group leader of the Magnetic Thin Film group. He joined Grainger Engineering’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering faculty in 2019.