Gilberto Fabbris, a physicist in the X-ray Science Division, has been named a recipient of an Early Career Research Program award from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science for 2024.
Fabbris is one of four researchers from DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory to receive the award this year. Whitney Armstrong and Tomas Polakovic from the Physics division and Jeremy Rouxel from the Chemical Sciences and Engineering also received the prestigious award, which comes with $550,000 per year for five years to further their research.
This DOE Office of Science program, now in its 15th year, seeks to strengthen the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to outstanding researchers early in their careers, when many scientists make formative contributions. Ninety-one awardees were selected from a large pool of applicants from universities and national labs based on peer review by scientific experts.
Fabbris is a physicist in Argonne’s X-ray Science Division. He works at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne, leading the high-pressure research program at the new POLAR beamline. His research explores magnetic properties in materials at extreme conditions using the ultrabright X-ray beams of the APS, one of the world’s brightest X-ray light sources.
Fabbris will build a new instrument at the POLAR beamline with the DOE award. The instrument is called MagXES — named after the technique it specializes in, magnetic X-ray emission spectroscopy — and will leverage novel X-ray spectrometer instrumentation and the increased capabilities of the upgraded APS to study magnetic properties at extreme conditions. These include very low temperatures, high pressures and high magnetic fields, all of which affect the atomic-scale behavior of materials.
By investigating the correlation between electronic and magnetic properties under these conditions, scientists will learn more about what drives novel phenomena in quantum systems. That knowledge will lead to insights into quantum materials and spintronics, with numerous potential applications.
“I’m extremely grateful that this project was chosen for this award,” Fabbris said. “An enormous amount of work from a large group of people at the APS made this possible, and the resulting instrument will be a credit to all of them. I’m excited to see what we learn by leveraging these new capabilities and observing phenomena that have previously been invisible to us.”
Full details on all the winners from Argonne are available in this story.