Amalia Coldea

Amalia Ioana Coldea is a Romanian quantum physicist who is Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. She was awarded the 2019 Institute of Physics Brian Pippard Prize and the 2011 EuroMagnet Prize.

Early life and education Coldea was born in Transylvania, Romania. She completed her undergraduate studies in the Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. She was a doctoral student at the University of Oxford. As a graduate student she was based at The Queen's College. Such materials are insulators in the bulk but have protected metallic surfaces, on which electrons cannot backscatter and outstanding transport mobilities are observed. She is particularly interested in superconductivity, a state of matter in which conduction electrons become correlated with one another and electrical resistance vanishes. She monitors quantum oscillations directly at the Fermi surface of these superconductors, as well as studying metallic systems. Her research has focussed on unconventional semiconductors based on iron. Superconductivity is a surprising observation in iron, as its strong ferromagnetism was expected to destroy any coherent electronic state. It has been proposed that superconductivity originates from nematic electronic states. These states break rotational symmetry, which gives rise to a distorted Fermi surfaces and anisotropic transport properties. She is interested in the use of high magnetic fields (up to 21 T) and cryogenic temperatures (down to 50 mK) to identify and study novel phases within quantum materials.

Recognition In 2019, Coldea was awarded the Institute of Physics Brian Pippard Prize.

She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2023 "for pioneering studies of the electronic structure and the nematic and superconducting orders of iron-based superconductors, using quantum oscillations, photoemission, and other techniques".

In September 2023 Coldea was awarded the Title of Distinction of Professor of Physics by the University of Oxford.

Selected publications

Personal life Coldea has two children.