Within the Department of Physics, there is also a Subdepartment for Condensed Matter Physics (SCMP). Currently SCMP includes five members: two assistant professors and three PhD students. Research mainly focuses on experimental investigation of metallic glasses and thin films through collaboration with several groups at the Institute of Physics in Zagreb, Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb, Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Institut Néel in Grenoble, and the Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb. The most important experimental contribution at our Department is associated with the Laboratory for Metal Physics where metallic glasses have been produced since the 1980’s.
Here the name of the late professor Edvin Girt is worth mentioning because he, cooperating with colleagues from the Institute of Physics in Zagreb, founded this laboratory. Metallic glasses are interesting both for fundamental research as well as for the possibilities of their application. Within the Laboratory, metallic glasses are produced in the form of ribbons using melt spinning. Unlike conventional metals, which possess a crystalline structure, metallic glasses are metastable and are disordered at the atomic scale.
The SCMP has in its possession a new Micro Vickers hardness tester, the DHV 1000Z, which can be used to measure hardness between 1 Hv and 2967 Hv and therefore can be used to examine different materials: metals, coloured metals, coatings, glasses, ceramics, bone samples etc. There is also an OPTIKA B-383MET (500x magnification) metallographic microscope equipped with a 5MP camera which enables various metallographic investigations. Measurements of microhardness for several metallic glass and high entropy alloy systems are currently underway.
In the last ten years, members of the SCMP have been involved in the production and characterization of charge density wave (CDW) thin films. Systems with CDW as an instability type arising from the electron-lattice coupling, which are usually found in quasi-one-dimensional materials, are well known and documented in crystals, but due to the effects of reduced dimensionality CDW films enable the examination of physical properties on meso- and microscales.
Besides, their exquisite properties such as huge dielectric permittivity, nonlinear transport and memory effects have a conceptual bearing on the possibility of their application. Thin films with properties resembling those of a monocrystal can be used to research CDW by techniques requiring optical thin films, such as electron diffraction or THz spectroscopy. Since 2019, members of the Subdepartment for Condensed Matter Physics have also been involved in the investigation of electrical properties of granular materials as well as thin films with a spatially ordered nanoparticle lattice.