Dr. Ivan K. Schuller,
a professor at Physics Department at University of
California San Diego, gave audiences of
college of Science of UTA a
colloquium. The talk is titled "Nanostructures:
Confinement, Proximity and Induced Effects".
Dr.
Schuller described a variety of representative basic research results,
which illustrated some of the exciting and novel results when magnetic
and/or superconducting materials were confined into small dimensions.
Interesting effects were observed when these dimensions were comparable
to magnetic length scales such as dipolar, exchange, and domain sizes
and superconducting length scales such as the penetration and coherence
lengths.
The abstract of the colloquium is as follows:
Magnetic
nanostructures are receiving increasing attention in recent years,
motivated by the interesting phenomena when the physical size becomes
comparable to relevant magnetic length scales. In addition a number of
important potential applications in the sensors and storage industries
have emerged. When magnetic nanostructures are in contact with other
dissimilar magnetic materials and because their magnetic fields extend
considerably outside the physical structure they are very susceptible to
interactions with the surrounding environment. A particularly
interesting situation is one in which a ferromagnetic nanostructure is
in contact with an antiferromagnetic substrate. In this "exchange
biased" configuration, a variety of unusual phenomena arise; the
reversal mode of the ferromagnet changes considerably, the
superparamagnetic transition temperature is affected and there is a
noticeable change in the microscopic spin configuration. I will describe
a series of experiments in which we studied these phenomena in
nanostructured ferromagnets prepared by electron beam lithography and
self assembly.
