C-SPIN in the Spotlight at the Joint MMM-Intermag Conference
More than ten C-SPIN PIs and nearly twenty C-SPIN students and postdoctoral fellows presented their C-SPIN research at the world's largest magnetic and spintronics conference this January in San Diego. Among them were three C-SPIN PIs who delivered prestigious invited talks on future spintronic materials and devices to more than 1,800 participants from magnetic and spintronic research institutions and industry.
- Prof. Maxim Tsoi from University of Texas at Austin, who demonstrated the world's first electrical switching of antiferromagnetic material, gave a talk on the interconnection between magnetic states and transport currents in antiferromagnetic Sr2IrO4.
- Prof. Christian Binek from University of Nebraska, who pioneered the research on the magnetoelectrical switching study of Cr2O3, gave a talk on magnetoelectric antiferromagnets for ultra-low power memory and logic and device applications.
- Prof. Geoff Beach from MIT, who co-discovered the voltage controlled magnetism on GdOx/Co bilayer structure, gave a talk on enhanced magneto-ionic switching of interface anisotropy in Pt/Co/GdOx films.
We have seen more and more researchers from STARnet companies participating and presenting exciting work at magnetic and spintronics conferences since the kickoff of C-SPIN. At this conference, Dr. Sasikanth Manipatruni from Intel, one of the world leading researchers on spin logic scaling study and a C-SPIN industry associate, presented a new and more scalable spin device concept by representing the Intel team: spin-orbit logic with magneto-electric nodes mediated by charge interconnects. Read More.
Q&A with Prof. Sara Majetich, Carnegie Mellon University
From Jian-Ping Wang, C-SPIN Director: It’s no accident that Sara Majetich has been with C-SPIN from the beginning. I knew of her stellar work on nanopatterning and conductive atomic force microscopy (C-AFM), so it was easy to imagine the MTJ’s of the future being made in her lab. Below is a short Q&A between Prof. Majetich and Michael Lotti. Read it and you’ll see why I was right.
Q: Describe the C-SPIN tasks that your group is working on.
A: Our work is in Theme 1. We’re focusing on conductive C-AFM measurements on MTJs that we make from materials that other C-SPIN PIs send to us. These images capture our work better than anything else. They show our success making MTJs of the same size with mostly uniform magnetic properties. Still, there are slight variations, and we aren’t as small as we need to be. The goal is to make < 20 nm devices with highly uniform switching properties. Using nanoparticle masking, we have made devices as small as 7 nm, but they were not thermally stable. Today the world’s smallest working MTJs are 11 nm in diameter, and we hope to break this record.
Q: How is your C-SPIN research applicable outside of the world of computer engineering?
A: The C-AFM tool is useful as a local conductivity probe of non-magnetic materials, especially when developing new nanoscale electronic structures. It enables rapid feedback that helps optimize device design. Read More.
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