Professor Ben Ruck
Position: Professor, School of Chemical and Physical Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington and Principal investigator, MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology.
Field: Physics.
Physics at work and play
Dr Ben Ruck is someone who makes the most of his passion for physics. He works with physics and plays with physics. For work, Ben teaches physics to students at Victoria University of Wellington, and he also heads a research team working on new materials for the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology. Outside work, when he’s not with his family, Ben does kickboxing and mountain running. Both are sports where knowledge of forces and motion give him an edge.
Dr Ben Ruck
Professor Ruck earlier in his career, when he was working as a post-doctoral researcher.
New materials
Ben’s research is, in part, looking for solutions to the energy demands of big data centres that house multiple computer servers. In 2025, data centres used 5% of global electricity. This is expected to grow significantly with the use of AI.
Ben is investigating rare-earth elements with superconducting properties as an alternative to silicon in computer hardware. A superconductor would reduce energy use because it does not lose energy like silicon based components. This 'lost energy' is lost as heat energy. This 'heat' doubles the cost of data centres, as they then need double the electricity to power cooling systems.
Ben works with thin films, just a few nanometres thick, of rare-earth nitrides, such as gadolinium nitride and samarium nitride. The rare-earths are a closely related group of metallic elements, which you’ll normally find at the bottom of the periodic table. When combined with nitrogen, some of these rare-earth elements become new semiconductor materials, with interesting magnetic and electrical properties.
To produce the films, Ben and his team combine the rare-earth element of interest with Nitrogen in a ‘Molecular beam epitaxy chamber’. This chamber provides a super clean and pure environment that heats and vaporises the rare-earth element and nitrogen in a vacuum, directing beams onto a surface where they form a nano thin film. The nitrogen takes electrons from the rare-earth element which made it a metal, turning it into a semiconductor.
Concurrent research is looking at the challenge of miniaturising superconducting circuitry and building scalable memory technology that can operate at the extreme low temperatures superconductors require.
Making a nanofilm
View inside a vacuum chamber while a nanofilm is being grown. The blue glow is the metal gadolinium being evaporated. The bright yellow is a heater, where the gadolinium nitride film is growing.
Theory meets experiment
Theoretical chemists use their knowledge of such things as atomic structure and the periodic table to predict the properties of chemical compounds and what might happen in chemical reactions. Many years ago, Ben, who is an experimental physicist, realised that theoretical chemists were trying to predict the properties of rare-earth nitrides, but they had very little experimental data to guide them. Ben had already developed ways to grow a semiconductor called gallium nitride, so he was able to turn his skills to helping the theorists test their ideas.
While the theorists needed the data from Ben’s practical experiments, Ben needed to expand his knowledge of theory to understand his results. He had to find out about the theory of the electric and magnetic structure of atoms. He also had to learn new experimental techniques, such as X-ray spectroscopy, and how to grow nanofilms of material in a vacuum to keep them pure.
Of course, Ben doesn’t work alone. He works closely with scientists around New Zealand and with others in Australia, America and France.
Like all scientists, Ben is always feeding his curiosity. He has been drawn to science because he sees it as a challenge, a way of getting to the bottom of mysteries. He is attracted to the idea of making things never made before, of finding out things never known before.
Useful links
Victoria University of Wellington celebrates Professor Ben Ruck promotion to professor in 2025 this YouTube video.
In this short YouTube video Dr Ben Ruck explains the role of novel magnetic materials in developing new ways of controlling the electronics inside your computer.
Home page of the School of Chemical and Physical Science at Victoria University of Wellington.
Find out about the project that Ben is working on with rare-earth nitrides to find a way to reduce the temperature at which data centres – giant computers – operate.
Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington hosts a wide range of physics experiments in both te reo Māori and English.
This article is based on information current in 2008 and 2025.
