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Overview
Facilities
Ultrafast laser
Ultra high
vacuum
sputtering
X-Rays
AGM
Magnetometry
MOKE
Magnetometry
Magnetotransport
People
Vacancies
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Magnetic materials provide one of the most exciting and fast moving
areas of physics research today. Recent advances in the fabrication
of nanostructures allow us to fabricate magnetic materials with
properties that challenge our basic understanding of magnetism. These
materials may exhibit strongly modified magnetic moments and
anisotropy. Alternatively they may possess completely new properties
such as interlayer exchange coupling and giant magnetoresistance.
Furthermore these materials have found immediate application in the
latest generation of magnetic recording technology, as the transducers
that read and write data and as the storage medium itself.
The Magnetic Materials group was founded in 1996 since when it has
grown rapidly. Our aim is to understand the basic science of
nanoscale magnetic materials. However we also maintain a dialogue
with scientists and engineers in the recording industry and consider
their needs when choosing new areas of investigation. We are
interested in dynamic magnetic phenomena occuring on femtosecond to
calendar timescales. These include picosecond switching of the
macroscopic magnetisation of ferromagnetic elements, spin wave
excitations in ferromagnets and the spin dynamics of individual
conduction electrons. We have a general interest in magnetotransport
properties and are actively fabricating and characterising magnetic
tunnel junction and spin valve structures. We are also studying
reversal and magnetic viscosity in such structures in order to
understand the structural origins of such effects. Finally we make
use of synchrotron radiation, at the ESRF in Grenoble and Daresbury,
and are developing in-house X-ray facilities for supporting structural
studies.
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