Physics Colloquium - Friday, January 24, 2014, 4:30, PSB 161

Dr. Samuel D. Bader

Argonne National Laboratory

Implications for Energy, Information and Medical Technologies

Spintronics encompasses the ever-evolving field of magnetic electronics.[1,2] Fields such as spintronics hold the potential to extend the information technology revolution as the semiconductor roadmap reaches its end. A major issue with present day electronics is in its demand for increased power. Spintronics offers the possibility to communicate via pure spin currents as opposed to electric charge currents. The talk provides a brief perspective of recent developments to switch magnetic moments by spin-polarized currents, electric fields and photonic fields Developments in the field of spintronics continue to be strongly dependent on the exploration and discovery of novel nanostructured materials and configurations. An array of exotic transport effects dependent on the interplay between spin and charge currents have been explored theoretically and experimentally in recent years. The talk highlights promising areas for future investigation, and, features recent work at Argonne, [3] including, most strikingly, in the realm of medical applications.[4]


1. S. D. Bader and S. S. P. Parkin, “Spintronics,” in Annual Reviews of Condensed Matter Physics 1, 71-88 (2010).
2. S. D. Bader, Rev. Mod. Phys. 78, 1-15 (2006).
3. Leyi Zhu, Yaohua Liu, F. S. Bergeret, J. E. Pearson, Suzanne G. E. te Velthuis, S. D. Bader and J. S. Jiang, Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 177001 (2013)
4. Dong-Hyun Kim, Elena A. Rozhkova, Ilya V. Ulasov, S. D. Bader, Tijana Rajh, M. S. Lesniak, and V. Novosad, Nature Materials 9, 165-171 (2010).

Contact:  Pat Korosec 3-1543