CCEM Talks: Dr. David Boldrin

Dr. David Boldrin is a researcher at the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom. His research focuses on condensed matter physics, quantum materials, frustrated magnetism, and the development of barocaloric materials for solid-state cooling technologies.

Entropy is usually something to minimise, but in the materials I study I want as much of it as possible. This talk follows a few questions across several seemingly unrelated systems: where does a material store its entropy, what does measuring it tell us, and how can we use it? In frustrated magnets, competing interactions and the absence of classical long-range order keep large entropy down to low temperatures, sometimes hidden from magnetic probes. Understanding this entropy tells us about exotic states such as quantum spin liquids. In barocaloric materials, the same principle drives applications: pressure triggers a phase transition whose entropy change can be used for heating and cooling. Together, these systems show how disorder and competing interactions can be used to engineer entropy, in pursuit of both fundamental physics and practical applications.