While the inner workings of iPods and cell phones are often overlooked by their users, the nanotechnology required to operate these devices is considered to be a modern triumph of the physical sciences.
West Virginia University is boosting its competitive curriculum in this 21st century discipline that controls matter on the atomic and molecular scale, thanks to the efforts of physics faculty member Sergei Urazhdin.
Urazhdin, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at WVU , recently received the National Science Foundations Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award for his proposal to enhance science education at the University and across the state.
The WVU professors goals include organizing a summer science camp for middle school students, encouraging graduate and undergraduate student involvement in nanoscience research and promoting diversity, especially among rural West Virginia populations, in the fields of science.
The award will support Physics at Nanoscale, a new undergraduate course at WVU open to all science majors beginning in the fall semester. The course will help advance the educational goals of the WVNano Initiative, the states focal point for nanoscale science engineering and education research, work force and economic development. The University is the founder and technical lead of WVNano.
The new course will make nanoscale physics available to nonphysics majors, and it will benefit physics majors as an introduction to quantum mechanics,Urazhdin said.
In addition, Urazhdin will be organizing a project which furthers his research with the WVU Spintronics Group. The group, led by Urazhdin, has been researching the effects of unexpected phenomena on tiny magnetic devices, which typically measure to about 100 nanometers.
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 electrons spin to encode digital information.
In a recent study published in the American Physical Societys Physical Review Letters ( http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v99/e046602 ), Urazhdin and WVU physics undergraduate student Nick Anthony discovered the effects of spin-polarized currents on a nanosized 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 David Lederman, professor of physics at WVU .The fact that he managed to get a paper published in one of the most respected physics journals in the worldand that the co-author is an undergraduate studentis remarkable in its own right, but it is especially significant given the topic of this years Nobel Prize.
The 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Albert Fert and Peter Grnberg for the discovery of giant magnetoresistence, the precursor to spintronics.
Urazhdin joined the WVU physics faculty in 2005. His research has been performed in the shared facilities established by WVNano, which strives to advance West Virginias research environment and to diversify its economic base.
The CAREER program offers the NSF s most prestigious awards in support of the early career development activities of teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.