Igor Dzyaloshinskii

Igor Dzyaloshinskii, Professor of the University of California, Irvine(since 1991) is one of the most vivid and original personalities from the famous Landau school in theoretical physics. He is an outstanding theoretical physicist who made a principal contribution to several fields of theoretical physics (magnetism, statistical physics, methods of theoretical physics, low-temperature physics, and physics of complex liquids). Most of the work done by Dzyaloshinskii belongs to the gold reserve of physics, but among all his works the papers with the highest impact to modern physics are from the realm of magnetism. Already in his almost the first publications (JETP, 1958 - 1960) Dzyaloshinskii explained the phenomenon of weak ferromagnetism - the appearance of spontaneous magnetization in antiferromagnetic materials. Since then the term ''Dzyaloshinskii interaction'' (becoming later on Dzyaloshinskii - Moriya interaction) has been generally accepted in the world literature. These papers gave rise to a new direction of investigations in many other systems, (bulk materials, frustrated magnets, spin glasses, thin films, quasi 1D magnets, nano-magnets, molecular magnets, and so on) with different kinds of magnetic orderings. Dzyaloshinskii idea led to the discovery of new phenomena - piezo-magnetism and magneto-electricity. The theory of magnetic phenomena has always remained within the areas of main scientific interest of I.Dzyaloshinskii. In 1964 he completed a series of papers (published in JETP) in which he constructed a theory of helicoidal magnetic structures (which becomes recently a subject of great interest for both applied and fundamental physics researches in the field of multiferroics). There are several Laboratories in Grenoble performing research based on these ideas of Dzyaloshinskii. ''Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction'' is one of the most frequently repeating combinations one can hear at various seminars, international conferences and scientific literature. Dzyaloshinskii was (and still is) one of the key player in the realm of magnetism. In his recent (2007-2009) publications (PRB, EPL) on multiferroics, Dzyaloshinskii discovered new (surprisingly overlooked in thousands publications on multiferroics) very interesting effects (like paramagnetism of phonon gas or motion of domain walls in ferromagnets under external electric field, the latter effect was experimentally confirmed in agreement with Dzyaloshinskii theoretical predictions). The workshop will focus on the present research in all these topics, which are very present in several laboratories in Grenoble.