Maxim Mostovoy graduated from the Novosibirsk State University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Groningen in 1998. He was a visiting scientist at the Max-Planck Institut für Festkörperforschung, Stuttgart. In 2004, he became an assistant professor in the Condensed Matter Theory group at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials, University of Groningen, where from 2017 he is a full professor. His research is focused on multiferroic and magnetoelectric materials, non-collinear magnetism, topological defects and spintronics. He was a coordinator of the Vrije FOM Programma, “Skyrmionics: Towards new magnetic skyrmions and topological memory”, 2017. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a Senior Visiting Scientist at RIKEN, Tokyo. His distinguished fellowships include Mercator professor at the University of Cologne, Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, Velux Professor at the International Niels Bohr Academy and Geoffrey Gordon Professor at the University of New South Wales. He is a member of the Editorial Boards of Physical Review B and npj Quanum Materials.

Selected publications (2017-2022)

1. An unusual four-state hysteresis was discovered in the multiferroic material GdMn2O5, in which the sign of the electric polarization is switched by the magnetic field applied at a magic angle. We showed theoretically that the increase and subsequent decrease of the magnetic field results in the unidirectional full-circle rotation of spins in this material:

Louis Ponet, S. Artyukhin, Th. Kain, J. Wettstein, Anna Pimenov, A.  Shuvaev, X. Wang, S-W Cheong, Maxim Mostovoy and Andrei Pimenov, Topologically protected magnetoelectric switching in a multiferroic,  Nature 607, 34-36 (2022).

1. An unconventional mechanism for spin-spiral ordering induced by magnetic impurities in a high-temperature multiferroic material was suggested in

Andrea Scaramucci, Hiroshi Shinaoka, Maxim V. Mostovoy, Markus Müller, Christopher Mudry, Matthias Troyer and Nicola A. Spaldin, Multiferroic Magnetic Spirals Induced by Random Magnetic Exchanges. Physical Review X 8, 011005 (2018).

1. We showed that the edge states formed in frustrated magnets are topological, and that their topology can be controlled by the electric current which causes emission of skyrmions from the nanostripe edges:

O. Leonov and M. Mostovoy, Edge states and skyrmion dynamics in nanostripes of frustrated magnets. Nature Communications 8, 14394 (2017).