Department of Physics, SFU

Home Page

View video of the presentation here: https://vimeo.com/119793897

In the early eighties a small group of physicists in North America and Europe embarked on idea of creating new metallic magnetic materials using atomic engineering. Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) was at that time already very successful in the gigahertz electronics using III/V compound semiconductors. The application of this technique to metals was viewed by the semiconductor community at that time with great skepticism. Physicists working in the early stages of magnetic nano structures were not distracted by these sceptics. Without having any clearly defined goals and landmarks they enthusiastically pressed ahead with their ideas. Slightly more than a decade later, the materials science based on ultrathin magnetic nanostructures has become one of the dominant themes of condensed matter physics and materials science involving thousands of scientists, worldwide. This is driven both by the fact that the subject of spin polarized transport is an challenging field of study, and also by technological opportunities which lie in electronic devices, which have a new degree of functionality based upon the spin of electrons. It led to the development of a major new direction in electronics-so called spintronics. Interlayer exchange coupling, giant magnetoresistance, spin valves and spin tunneling are now well developed concepts used even in daily press. We have now hard drive disks with the memory densities of 100 Gigabits/inch2. Motorola, Honeywell and IBM and European and Japanese counterparts are in the race introducing commercially successful non-volatile random access memory (MRAM), spin polarized light emitting diodes (SPLED), and spin transistors. In this talk some of this progress, challenges and future opportunities will be highlighted.

Bret Heinrich is a Professor of Physics and Director of the Surface Science Laboratory at Simon Fraser University (SFU). He is also a member of the Pacific Center for Advanced Materials and Microstructures. Dr. Heinrich received his Ph.D. in Physics from the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Czechoslovakia, in 1967. After holding research positions in the USSR Academy and the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, he moved to British Columbia to become a Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University in 1969. He progressed through the ranks at SFU, becoming a Full Professor in 1996. Dr. Heinrich was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1995, and in 1998 he received the Humboldt Research Award of the Humboldt Foundation in Germany. He was cited for "outstanding research in the field of surface science."