Hélène Béa (born 1980) is Associate Professor at Université Grenoble Alpes and at Spintec. Her current research area covers electric field effects on interfacial magnetic properties in ultrathin ferromagnetic films. In particular she optimizes material and studies the control of interfacial magnetic anisotropy and Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction by a gate voltage and also the resulting effect on the stability and motion of magnetic skyrmions. She also has expertise in the endurance and breakdown mechanisms of magnetic tunnel junctions, their noise, on spin transfer torque in antiferromagnets and on exchange bias mechanisms.
She joined Spintec in 2009 after a post-doc at the University of Geneva and a PhD thesis at UMR CNRS/Thales. Her previous research topics were multiferroic and magnetoelectric materials. In particular she studied their epitaxial growth and structure, but also their magnetic and ferroelectric properties. In particular, she studied ferroelectric domain properties at a microscopic scale by using atomic force microscopy in piezoresponse mode, used the antiferromagnetic properties of the material to induce an exchange bias in an adjacent ferromagnet and used the insulating character of the multiferroic in magnetic tunnel junctions.
She is currently coordinating two ANR projects, ELECSPIN on electric field assisted spintronic devices with 4 partners and ADMIS, a young researcher project (JCJC) on the gate voltage control of Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction for spintronics devices.
She currently teaches point mechanics for first year student (License 1), magnetism and nanomagnetism for Master students (fourth and fifth year, M1 and M2) and has taught electromagnetism and propagating waves, atomic force and scanning tunnel microscopies.