Laura Heyderman is the winner of the Charpak-Ritz Prize 2026

Her PhD on the magnetic properties of coupled permalloy thin films was obtained in 1991 at the CNRS in Meudon, Paris, before working as a post-doctoral research assistant on electron microscopy of magnetic materials in the Physics and Astronomy Department, University of Glasgow, UK.

Since 2013, Laura Heyderman holds a joint appointment as Professor for Mesoscopic Systems at ETH Zurich and the Paul Scherrer Institute. Her research has consistently pushed the boundaries of our understanding of magnetic nanostructures, artificial spin systems, and functional hybrid materials.

She has made significant breakthroughs in the field of mesoscopic magnetic systems, which incorporate magnets with sizes ranging from tens of nanometres to a few micrometres. She combines innovative nanofabrication and large-scale facility characterisation methods, mainly synchrotron x-ray techniques but also low energy muon spectroscopy and neutron scattering, to uncover novel phenomena that occur as a result of the reduced dimensions.

In addition to her fundamental scientific contributions, her work is significant for high technology applications with particular impact in computing technologies. Her mesoscopic magnetic systems also have potential for use in mobile communications, as well as in sensors and actuators for the automotive and biomedical industries.

Contributions and recent work

Her key contributions can be summarized as follows:

• The creation of innovative nanomagnetic devices, with the demonstration of electrically controlled domain wall logic and the complex motion of microscale origami micromachines.
• The unequivocal observation of emergent magnetic monopoles and phase transitions in artificial spin ice.
• The development of synchrotron x-ray magnetic tomography to reveal magnetic topological features in 3D.

Prof. Heyderman is internationally recognized for her ability to design, fabricate, and manipulate mesoscale magnetic systems to enable new physical phenomena and applications. She is a world leader in the expanding research community studying artificial spin ice, and her contributions have been marked by innovation both in understanding physical phenomena in these systems and in developing new ways to probe them.

Prof. Heyderman’s group continues to be among the leaders of the field, with recent work demonstrating the intriguing behaviour of 3D systems, ordering of magnetotoroidal moments, relaxation to the ground state following ultrafast laser excitation, as well as the application of artificial spin systems to new forms of computing.