Stuart S.P. Parkin to receive 2012 Von Hippel Award for spintronics
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Stuart S.P. Parkin to receive 2012 Von Hippel Award for spintronics
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he 2012 Von Hippel Award, the Materials Research Society’s highest honor, will be presented to Stuart S.P. Parkin, IBM Fellow, Manager of the Magnetoelectronics Group, and Director of the IBM-Stanford Spintronic Science and Applications Center (SpinAps) at IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. Parkin is being recognized for “pioneering contributions to the science and technology of spintronic materials, particularly in establishing the fundamental foundations of spin-engineered magnetic heterostructures and demonstrating artificial atomically-layered magnetic multilayers for applications in field sensing, magnetic memory and data storage devices.” Parkin will accept the honor during the awards ceremony at the 2012 MRS Fall Meeting in Boston. Parkin, who received the inaugural MRS Outstanding Young Investigator Award in 1991 and joined the MRS inaugural class of fellows in 2008, essentially created and defined the research field of spintronics. After the initial discovery of the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect in 1998 by Nobel laureates Peter Grunberg (KFA, Jülich) and Albert Fert (Université Paris-Sud), Parkin opened the door for applications of GMR. One of his remarkable contributions to fundamental science was his discovery of the oscillatory interlayer exchange coupling and related GMR effect in metallic superstructures. Parkin demonstrated that oscillatory interlayer coupling is a universal property of nearly all transition and noble-metal-based multilayers, thus developing a method of designing specific materials with special proper-
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MRS BULLETIN
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VOLUME 37 • OCTOBER 2012
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ties—here the GMR effect—based on their superstructure. His systematic investigation of a large number of elemental combinations enabled Parkin to find the unique combination of ferromagnetic and nonmagnetic metals that gives rise to a very large magnetoresistance effect at room temperature. These designed “nanoengineered devices” with sophisticated properties, together with the development of a rapid and versatile sputtering method for thin-film structure exploration rendered the application of the GMR effect possible. Parkin and his colleagues furthermore developed novel magnetic-field sensing devices, which they named spin valves, for use in magnetic disk-drive read heads. Structures based on Parkin’s discoveries and inventions were used in IBM’s first GMR recording head in 1997, and soon thereafter in all manufacturers’ hard-disk drives as well as in many other magnetic-field sensors, magnetic memory elements, and antiferromagnetically coupled magnetic media for high-density harddisk drives. Spin valves are also now used for sensors in the automotive industry and for biomedical applications. The GMR-based spin-valve field sensor was superceded by the giant tunnel magnetoresistance effect (TMR), another of Parkin’s discoveries. Parkin demonstrated that the TMR effect, found when electrons tunnel between ferromagnetic layers separated by an u
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