Highlights

In a collaboration with an industrial manufacturer of aerosol jet printers (Optomec, Inc.), Lodge, Frisbie, and their students have demonstrated successful low voltage operation of an array of ion-gel gated OFETs printed on flexible polyimide substrates. Every component of the OFETs was printed—the metal electrodes (gold colloidal ink), the semiconductor (poly(3-hexylthiophene), and the gate insulator (the new ion gel material).

Recently, IRG-3 students Jyo Saha, Mike Lund, and Mun Chan, working with postdoc Jeff Parker and IRG faculty Chris Leighton, Randy Victora, and Paul Crowell, have performed one of the most detailed studies of this exchange pinning in materials very similar to those used in hard disks. Most importantly, the experimental results were directly compared to realistic micromagnetic simulations. These supercomputer simulations break the sample up into hundreds of thousands of tiny magnetic elements (see figure), and are sufficiently powerful that the all-important defects can be properly accounted for.

In semiconductor spintronics, the spin of the electron carries information for both storage and data processing. To some extent, the electron spin can be viewed as a miniature bar magnet that interacts with a magnetic field inside the semiconductor. The orientation of the bar magnet acts as a “bit” of information. […]

Ion Gel-Gated Polymer Thin Film Transistors (IRG 2). A major goal of organic electronics is the development of new kinds of solution processable organic dielectric materials that can serve as gate insulators in organic thin film transistors (OTFTs). An important figure of merit for prospective gate dielectrics is the specific capacitance, which determines how much […]

Exchange bias as a probe of the incommensurate spin density wave in epitaxial Fe/Cr (001).
Magnetism in metallic films and interfaces has been intensively studied since the discovery of Giant MagnetoResistance (GMR) in the late 1980’s. This effect enabled fabrication of high sensitivity magnetic field sensors for the read heads in magnetic hard disks, revolutionizing magnetic […]

A team of a dozen third- and fourth-grade students forcefully stepped on the clear, white, sticky floor mat to remove the dust from their shoes before eagerly suiting up in full-body cleanroom suits at the University’s Nanofabrication Center in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science building Friday.
Dressed in the white “bunny suits” used to keep […]