Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

An immerging technology, called spintronics, has had an enormous impact on the computer hard drive industry.  Spintronics adds new versatility to existing technologies by using novel magnetic materials.  Hard drive densities have doubled every year as a result of spintronic read heads.  The challenge placed on this new technology is to incorporate it not only into the hard drives, but also into the integrated circuits.  Random access memory built with spintronic components would need no power to maintain its information, which is a very attractive property for portable electronic devices.            The goal of this research is to grow and characterize new spintronics materials.  One class of materials that will be investigated is ferromagnetic semiconductors, which integrate ferromagnetic materials directly into semiconductors.  We are exploring adding small amounts of manganese to germanium and silicon to make a new ferromagnetic material.  The impact will be enormous if a ferromagnetic semiconductor is discovered that is both ferromagnetic at room temperature and compatible with silicon technology.            This research will explore the magnetism in silicon and germanium grown by Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE).  This technique layers materials together one atomic layer at a time.  One difficulty with making semiconductors magnetic is their low solubility for magnetic elements.  The conditions created by MBE incorporate magnetic elements at levels much higher than otherwise possible.  This proposal requests funds for an Auger Electron Spectrometer that would upgrade the capabilities of the MBE chamber.  This instrument would measure the chemical composition of the outer most atomic layers of the materials that are grown in the MBE chamber.  This would enable us to follow the chemical composition of our films at various stages during the growth.