Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Our Information Age is evolving into the Experience Age using the exponentially increasing number of advances in technology. Successful adaptation will require that we navigate to a future where the energy consumed and emissions generated by these technologies are separated. My program seeks to address this crucial high impact challenge by connecting nanomagnet design with explorations into quantum magnetism to make new metamaterials built of nanomagnets. The long term goal of my program is to design and build a new class of physical reservoir computing (PRC) system based on nanomagnet artificial spin glasses. PRC exploits the complex dynamics of physical systems for information processing in artificial neural networks. A spin glass has inherent complexity through random patterns of aligned and misaligned atomic magnets (spins) that create frustrated interactions. My group will make the first artificial spin glasses using metamaterials of custom-made nanomagnets with "superspin moments" that will permit deliberate tuning of frustration in the spin glass state. PRC systems built with our artificial spin glasses will provide a fresh sandbox to explore and challenge developing neural models at a compatible level of connectivity and power consumption as the human brain (compared to ChatGPT's ~10,000 households/day). To build the necessary tools my HQP play in the rich physics playground and work with the abundance of applications that magnetism enables. It is founded on understanding quantum interactions. These interactions are subtle and more than a little mysterious in nanomagets. We will explore, understand, and use nanomagnetism in transition metal oxides (TMOs; one of the most interesting and useful class of solids). During this grant cycle, at least 12 HQP will use cutting-edge experimental and simulation techniques to make, identify and understand the interactions inside and between nanomagnets. My HQP have been making groundbreaking contributions to a large and growing body of experimental evidence that the oxygen (O) atoms in a TMO nanomagnet can be active participants in the magnetism. Scientific consensus says they should not be interacting. Filling this "oxygen knowledge gap" will permit new control of interactions. My HQP will then build new nanomagnets for controlling artificial spin glass magnetism and PRCs. My HQP's work is being adopted by groups from Harvard to NIST to ESRF to Tokyo Univ., and garnering them awards and high impact publications. The wide range of topics my HQP will explore, and the breath and depth of experimental, theoretical and simulations tools they learn and use for the proposed research is pivotal to further enabling the diverse, equitable and exciting lab that I have created that fosters creation and innovation, and pushes the boundaries of the unknown continuously.