Spaldin was inspired to search for multiferroics,
magnetic ferroelectric materials, by a remark about potential collaboration made by a colleague studying ferroelectrics during her
postdoctoral research studying magnetic phenomena at
Yale University from 1996 to 1997. She continued to develop the theory of these materials as a new faculty member at the
University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and in 2000 published (under her previous name, Hill) "a seminal article" Following her theoretical predictions, in 2003 she was part of a team that experimentally demonstrated the multiferroic properties of
bismuth ferrite, BiFeO3. (selected by Science magazine as one of their "Areas to watch" in their 2007 Breakthroughs of the Year section), the discovery of conducting ferroelectric domain walls and a strain-driven
morphotropic phase boundary, again in BiFeO3, and the identification of new mechanisms for multiferroicity, for example the improper geometric ferroelectricity in YMnO3. In the same time period, she developed and implemented methodology to allow application of finite electric and magnetic fields to metal-insulator heterostructures within the density functional theory formalism, allowing her to solve the long-standing problem of the origin of the dielectric dead layer in capacitors and to identify previously unknown routes to magnetoelectric coupling. Spaldin moved from UCSB to
ETH Zurich in 2010. these have proved relevant for understanding the occurrence of magnetism at the surfaces of compensated
antiferromagnets as well as for characterizing phenomena as diverse as altermagnetism and magnetic skyrmions. Second, the establishment of Dynamical Multiferroicity, which spawned interest in so-called chiral phonons and their associated magnetic moments. And third, the unexpected application of multiferroics in other more fundamental branches of physics: She designed a new multiferroic with the precise specifications required to allow a solid-state search for the electric dipole moment of the electron and identified a multiferroic with a symmetry-lowering phase trainsition that generates the crystallographic equivalent of
cosmic strings. These "cross-over" projects led to a current interest in
dark-matter direct detection. Her publications are listed on
Google scholar. the winner of the
Rössler Prize of the ETH Zurich Foundation in 2012, the 2015 winner of the
Körber European Science Prize for "laying the theoretical foundation for the new family of multiferroic materials" and one of the laureates of the 2017
L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science. In November 2017 she was awarded the Lise-Meitner Lectureship of the Austrian and German Physical Societies in
Vienna and in 2019 she won the Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist. In 2021 she received the IUPAP Magnetism Award and Néel Medal, and in 2022 the Europhysics Prize of the European Physical Society and the Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics. In 2023, she won the
Gothenburg Lise Meitner Award. Spaldin is a
Fellow of the
American Physical Society (2008), the
Materials Research Society (2011), the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (2013) an Honorary Fellow of
Churchill College, Cambridge, and a member of
Academia Europaea (2021) and the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (2021). She is a Foreign Associate of the US
National Academy of Engineering (2019) and the US National Academy of Sciences, the
French Academy of Sciences (2021), the
Austrian Academy of Sciences (2022) and the
German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina (2022). She is an External Scientific Member of the
Max Planck Society and a Fellow-Ambassadeur of the
CNRS.
Service Spaldin is a member of the ERC Scientific Council and a founding Lead Editor of
Physical Review Research.
Teaching Spaldin has twice received the ETH Golden Owl for Teaching Excellence as well as the ETH Award for Best Teaching. Some of her lectures are available on her youtube channel. She coordinated the revision of her Department's BSc Curriculum in Materials and documented it in a blog. Her textbook on Magnetic Materials is published by
Cambridge University Press. ==References==