Profile Photo

Anushika Athauda

  • Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering

PhD, University of Virginia, 2017

a.athauda@rochester.edu


Biography

Professor Anushika Athauda received her bachelor’s degree in engineering physics from University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and PhD in physics from University of Virginia. She joins the University of Rochester as an assistant professor of instruction, after serving as an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and prior to that as a visiting assistant professor of physics and engineering at Washington and Lee University.

Research Overview

Prof. Athauda is an experimentalist in condensed matter physics. Her research is mainly focused on designing, synthesizing, characterizing, and investigating the structure of novel materials, especially, materials that can potentially unveil superconducting properties. Investigating various possibilities of inducing superconductivity, designing new materials showing these exotic properties and investigating the crystal structure and local lattice distortions that contribute to the mechanism of superconductivity using single crystal and powder diffraction measurements are the foundation of her research. She is also proficient in synthesizing polycrystalline samples and her professional training also encompasses neutron and x-ray diffraction under different sample environments at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory. 

Representative Publications
1. Sharon Philip, Anushika Athauda, Yoshikazu Mizuguchi, Yosuke Goto, Despina Louca, “Out-of-plane sulfur distortions in the Bi 4 O 4 S 3 superconductor”, Condensed Matter 6, 48 (2021)

2. Anushika Athauda, Despina Louca, “Nanoscale atomic distortions in the BiS 2 superconductors : ferrodistortive sulfur modes”, Journal of the Physical Society of Japan 88, 041004, Special Topics : Recent Progress in BiS 2 Materials Science (2019)

3. Anushika Athauda, Yoshikazu Mizuguchi, Masanori Nagao, Joerg Neuefeind, Despina Louca, “Charge Fluctuations in the NdO 1-x F x BiS 2 Superconductors”, Journal of the Physical Society of Japan 86 (2017)

4. Anushika Athauda, Christina Hoffman, Yang Ren, Xiangde Zhu, Saicharan Aswartham, Jasminka Terzic, Gang Cao, Despina Louca, “Ferro-Lattice- Distortions and Charge Fluctuations in Superconducting LaO 1−x F x BiS 2 ”, Journal of the Physical Society of Japan 86, 054701 (2017)

5. Anushika Athauda, Junjie Yang, Seunghun Lee, Yoshikazu Mizuguchi, Keita Deguchi, Yoshihiko Takano, Osuke Miura, Despina Louca, “In-plane Charge Fluctuations in Bismuth Sulfide Superconductors”, Physical Review B 91, 144112 (2015)

Research Interests

  • Condensed matter physics
  • Novel materials
  • Superconductivity
  • Single crystal and powder diffraction
  • Synthesizing polycrystalline samples
  • Neutron diffraction
  • X-Ray diffraction