Intermetallic materials are an important group of matter at the forefront of current technical development due to their interesting physical properties including mechanic, thermal, transport, magnetic and electronic properties in general. These properties can be influenced by changes of external conditions such as temperature, magnetic field or mechanical pressure. The last mentioned parameter is a unique tool to change the distances between atoms in the studied material by the chemically most pure way and enables view into new fields in the phase space. Besides other mentioned physical variables, variation of pressure faces to a rather complicated situation caused namely by the technical difficulty of high pressure experimental methods. Development of high pressure techniques in the past decades has nevertheless made the application of pressure a regular constituent of characterization procedures and enabled to vary this physical variable for study of phenomena like quantum criticality, valence changes etc. Our laboratory incorporates high pressure experiments in combination with low temperatures and high magnetic fields and enables to follow the studied effects within the phase space. The seminar will be devoted to introductory remarks on the effects of pressure in materials, possible experimental approaches and obtained results on selected compounds.
The seminar will be chaired by Hynek Němec, Department of Dielectrics.