Professor Stephen Blundell
Professorial Fellow in Physics
Professor Stephen Blundell
Professorial Fellow in Physics
Stephen Blundell is a Professor of Physics and a Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College. After studying physics and taking his doctorate at the University of Cambridge, he moved to Oxford as an EPSRC Fellow, and then took a Junior Research Fellowship at Merton College. His research is in the area of magnetism and superconductivity, and he is particularly known for his contributions to the technique of muon-spin rotation, in which radioactive particles called muons are implanted into samples in order to study their magnetic properties. He has authored or co-authored six books with Oxford University Press, including Magnetism in Condensed Matter Concepts in Thermal Physics and Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur.
Research interests
Stephen’s research is concerned with using muon-spin rotation and other magnetic techniques to study a range of organic and inorganic materials, especially those showing interesting magnetic, superconducting, or dynamical properties. He is particularly interested in seeing how quantum properties can be realised in condensed matter systems. Recently he has been developing a technique called DFT+μ for understanding muon sites and also working on a project to upgrade Oxford’s Pulsed Field system to generate very high magnetic fields.
Articles & book chapters
- ‘Magnetic order and ballistic spin transport in a sine-Gordon spin chain’, BM Huddart, M Gomilšek, TJ Hicken, FL Pratt, SJ Blundell, PA Goddard, S J Kaech, J L Manson, and T Lancaster in Physical Review B 103, L060405 (2021).
- ‘Magnetic ground state of the one-dimensional ferromagnetic chain compounds M(NCS)2(thiourea)2 (M = Ni, Co)’, SPM Curley, R Scatena, RC Williams, PA Goddard, P Mac-chi, TJ Hicken, T Lancaster, F Xiao, SJ Blundell, V Zapf, JC Eckert, EH Krenkel, JA Villa, ML Rhodehouse, and JL Manson in Physical Review Materials 5, 034401 (2021).
- ‘The internal field in a ferromagnetic crystal with chiral molecular packing of achiral organic radicals’, SJ Blundell, T Lancaster, PJ Baker, FL Pratt, D Shiomi, K Sato and T Takui in Magnetochemistry 7, 71 (2021).
- Muon Spectroscopy: An Introduction ed SJ Blundell, R De Renzi, T Lancaster, FL Pratt (Oxford University Press, 2021)
- ‘Information and Decoherence in a Muon-Fluorine Coupled System’ JM Wilkinson and SJ Blundell, in Phys Rev Lett 12, 087201 (2020).