Events Calendar

Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Seminar - Lyman L. Handy Colloquia

Speaker: Professor Caroline A. Ross, Iron garnets: enabling materials for magnonics, photonics and spintronics

Abstract: Ferromagnetic insulator thin films have emerged as an important component of magnonic, spintronic and magnetooptical devices. Yttrium iron garnet in particular is an excellent insulator with low damping, and has been incorporated into heterostructures that exhibit a plethora of spintronic and magnonic phenomena including spin pumping, spin Seebeck, proximity effects and spin wave propagation. Rare earth (RE) garnet films are both magnetic and magnetoelastic, and their properties can be manipulated by choice of composition and substrate. We grow films of bismuth, thulium, europium, dysprosium and terbium iron garnets with high structural quality down to a thickness of 2.5 nm, about 2 unit cells, and describe the transmission of spin across the interface of garnet/Pt bilayers. Spin orbit torque drives domain wall motion at room temperature at velocities exceeding 4 km/s, and chiral textures and skyrmions are present in garnet films. Iron garnets also exhibit magnetooptical activity and high transparency in the infrared, and we demonstrate integrated magnetooptical isolators comprising Bi and Ce garnets to control the flow of light in photonic integrated circuits.

References: Nature Nanotech. (2019), Optica 6 473 (2019), ACS Photonics 5, 5010 (2018), Phys. Rev. Mater. 2, 094405 (2018), Nature Materials 16, 309-“314 (2017), Adv. Electron. Mater. 3 1600376 (2017), Phys. Rev. B 95 115428 (2017)

Biography: Prof. Ross joined MIT in 1997 and is a Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. From 1991 to 1997, she was an engineer at Komag Inc, a manufacturer of hard disks. She received her undergraduate degree and Ph.D. in Materials Science and Metallurgy at Cambridge University. She has been chair of the Magnetism and Magnetic Materials Conference and the Materials Research Society Spring Meeting, and has 21 patents awarded and has authored over 400 publications. Prof. Ross is a fellow of the American Physical Society, Institute of Physics (UK), IEEE and Materials Research Society. Her research interests include the magnetic, magnetooptical and multiferroic properties and device applications of thin films, particularly complex oxides such as garnets and perovskites, and the self-assembly of block copolymers and nanocomposite films.

Host: Dr. Armani

Location: John Stauffer Science Lecture Hall (SLH) - 102

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Karen Woo/Mork Family