Date/Time
Date(s) - 21/09/2005
3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Title: Nanomagnetism

Speaker: Dr. Kristen Buchanan

Institute: Materials Science Division, Argonne National Laboratory

Location: ABB 102

Description:

Magnets play an important role in our everyday life in a variety of ways, for example, computer hard drives, iPods, credit cards, electric motors, audio speakers, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, are all devices that rely on magnetism. When the size of a magnet is reduced to the nanoscale, its properties can be drastically different due to geometrical confinement effects. Nanomagnets have potential for enhancing existing technologies such as magnetic storage media and magnetic sensors and they may also find new applications in biomedicine and spintronics, an emerging field that exploits not only the charge of the electron but also its spin. Nanomagnetism is presently an exciting and active area of research as there are many basic questions to be answered before nanomagnets can be exploited to their full potential. In general, the magnetic properties of ferromagnets can be understood in terms of competition between the magneto-crystalline, exchange, and magnetostatic energies due to long range dipole-dipole interactions. Through patterning and thin film growth processes, model systems that demonstrate unique behavior in restricted geometries can be fabricated and investigated. The talk will give an overview of the field and discuss some of the recent advances in understanding the static and dynamic properties of magnetic vortices that are often found in the ground state of magnetically soft structures.