Nanoscience Course to be offered by Physics Department, Physics Professor wins NSF CAREER Award

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. December 12, 2007: While the interworkings of iPods and cell phones are often overlooked by their users, the nanotechnology required to operate these devices is considered by many in the industry to be a modern triumph of the physical sciences.

Thanks to the efforts of Dr. Sergei Urazhdin, assistant professor of physics in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University and recent recipient of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award, the WVU Spintronics Group is establishing a competitive curriculum in nanoscience.

Dr. Urazhdin recently earned the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Development (CAREER) Award for his proposal to enhance interest in science and nanoscience education in Morgantown. His goals are to organize a summer science camp for middle school students, to encourage growth in graduate and undergraduate student involvement in nanoscience research, and to promote diversity, especially among the rural West Virginia populations, in the field of science.

The CAREER Award also will support a new undergraduate course Physics at Nanoscale, open to all science majors, to be offered in the Fall 2008 semester. The course helps to advance the educational goals of the WVNano Initiative, WVU’s Nanoscale Science, Engineering and Education (NSEE) Initiative.

“The new course will focus on the novel properties acquired by physical systems when their size is reduced, and the links between the properties of large and nanoscale systems,” stated Dr. Urazhdin in his proposal. “The course will make nanoscale physics available to non-physics majors, and it will benefit physics majors as an introduction to Quantum Mechanics.”

In addition to the educational portion of the award, Dr. Urazhdin will be organizing a project which furthers his spintronics research.

Spintronics is a technology that may soon replace some of the common elements found in electronic devices. A spintronic device uses the direction of an electron’s spin to encode digital information. The WVU Spintronics Group, led by Dr. Urazhdin, has been researching the effects of unexpected phenomena on these tiny magnetic devices which typically measure to about 100 nanometers.

In a recent study published in the American Physical Society’s Physical Review Letters, Dr. Urazhdin and WVU Physics undergraduate student Nick Anthony discovered the effects of these spin-polarized currents on a nano-sized antiferromagnet in a spin-valve, one of the key magnetic structures in computer hard drives.

“Sergei Urazhdin has made several significant contributions to the field of spintronics,” said Dr. David Lederman, professor of physics at WVU. “The fact that he managed to get a paper published in PRL, arguably one of the most respected physics journals in the world, and that the co-author is an undergraduate student, is remarkable in its own right, but it is especially significant given the topic of this year’s Nobel Prize.”

The 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg for the discovery of giant magnetoresistence, the precursor to spintronics.

“The CAREER-funded project will address the possibility of expanding the scope of manipulation of spin transfer to complex magnetic systems, including antiferromagnets, and to magnetic configurations in which the usual spin torque becomes inefficient,” Dr. Urazhdin explained in his proposal.

The CAREER program offers NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.

Dr. Urazhdin’s research was performed in the shared facilities established by the WVNano Initiative. WVNano strives to advance West Virginia’s research environment and to diversify its economic base by cultivating targeted areas of NSEE. These efforts are supported by the National Science Foundation, West Virginia University and the state of West Virginia.

Dr. Urazhdin earned his Ph.D. from Michigan State University and completed his postdoctoral work at Johns Hopkins University. He joined the faculty in WVU’s Department of Physics in 2005 where he currently leads the experimental spintronics research group.

The PRL study is available online at http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v99/e046602. For more information on the WVNano Initiative, please contact Dr. Thomas H. Myers, Co-Director and Robert C. Byrd Professor of Physics, at Thomas.Myers@mail.wvu.edu, or visit their website at wvnano.wvu.edu. For more information on the project or CAREER award, please contact Dr. Urazhdin at Sergei.Urazhdin@mail.wvu.edu.

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