The spin on electronics!

• Professor Stuart Parkin FRS
• Audio recording (mp3)

• Professor Gabriel Aeppli

• Professor Bryan Hickey

• Professor Albert Fert, University of Paris, France
• Audio recording (mp3)

Albert Fert graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.  He received a Master's degree from the University of Paris in 1963.  He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Paris in 1970.  He joined the University of Paris-Sud in 1976 where he is a Professor of Physics.  Since 1985, Professor Fert is the scientific director of a joint laboratory of the French  National Center for Scientific Research and the company Thales. Professor Fert's experimental (and theoretical) research is in condensed matter physics (metals, magnetism, spintronics). Professor Fert was one of the co-discovers of Giant Magnetoresistance in 1988. This discovery has led to multiple applications and has triggered the development of the research field which is now called spintronics.

Professor Fert has made many contributions to the development of this field. He has published more than 300 scientific articles.  One of the publications currently has over 4000 citations and is in the "Top Ten" of the ten most cited articles in Physical Review Letters (PRL) since the creation of the letters journal in 1953. Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg were awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physics for their independent co-discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR).  GMR has been used in hard drives and magnetic sensors and handheld devices like MP3 digital audio players and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).

Professor Fert has received a number of other prestigious awards including the American Physics Society International Prize for New Materials (1994), the Grand Prix de Physique Jean Ricard of the French Physical Society (1994), the Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize (1997), the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Gold Medal (2003), the Wolf Prize in Physics (2006) and the Japan Prize (2007).  He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 2004.  

• Professor Stuart Parkin FRS
• Audio recording (mp3)

• Professor David Awschalom, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

David Awschalom obtained a B.Sc. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University. After serving as a research staff member and manager of the nonequilibrium physics group at the IBM Watson Research Center, he joined the University of California-Santa Barbara as a Professor of Physics, Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is presently the Peter J. Clarke Professor and Director of the California NanoSystems Institute, and Director of the Center for Spintronics and Quantum Computation.

His group has research activities in optical and magnetic interactions in semiconductor quantum structures, spin dynamics and coherence in condensed matter systems, and implementations of quantum information processing in the solid state. He has developed a variety of femtosecond-resolved spatiotemporal spectroscopies and micromagnetic sensing techniques aimed at exploring charge and spin motion in the quantum domain.

Dr. Awschalom received an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award, the Outstanding Investigator Prize of the Materials Research Society, the International Magnetism Prize and Néel Medal of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, the Oliver E. Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society, the Europhysics Prize of the European Physical Society, and the Newcomb Cleveland Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Awschalom is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. 

• Professor Hideo Ohno, Tohoku University, Japan
• Audio recording (mp3)

Hideo Ohno received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Tokyo in 1977, 1979 and 1982, respectively. He spent one year as a visiting-graduate student at Cornell University, Ithaca, USA from 1979. He joined the Faculty of Engineering of Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan in 1982. He was a visiting scientist at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center from 1988 to 1990. He moved to Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan as Professor in 1994, where he is currently Director of Laboratory for Nanoelectronics and Spintronics, Research Institute of Electrical Communication.

His current research interests include physics and applications of spin-related phenomena in semiconductor as well as in metal-based nanostructures. Professor Ohno received the IBM Japan Science Award (1998), the IUPAP Magnetism Prize (2003), Japan Academy Prize (2005), Presidential Prize for Research Excellence, Tohoku University (2005) and the 2005 Agilent Technologies Europhysics Prize. 

He has been a fellow of the Institute of Physics (IOP) since 2004, an honorary professor of Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences since 2006 and a fellow of the Japan Society of Applied Physics (JSAP) since 2007.  Tohoku University appointed him as a distinguished professor (2008). Professor Ohno was named the Distinguished Lecturer for 2009 by IEEE Magnetics Society. 

• Professor Dan Ralph, Cornell University
• Audio recording (mp3)

Dan Ralph received a B.S. in physics and mathematics at Vanderbilt University and a Ph.D. in experimental physics at Cornell University in 1994.  After a postdoctoral appointment at Harvard University, he joined the Cornell physics faculty in 1996, where he has been since. 

His research interests are focused on the properties of nanometer scale magnetic, superconducting, and molecular devices.  He is currently the Horace White Professor of Physics and the Director of the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics at Cornell. 

• Professor Claudia Felser, University of Mainz, Germany
• Audio recording (mp3)

Claudia Felser earned her diploma in chemistry at the University of Cologne in 1989 and completed her doctorate there in 1994. After postdoctoral fellowships at the MPI inStuttgart and the CNRS in Nantes (France), she joined the University of Mainz. She was a visiting scientist at Princeton University  (USA) and a visiting professor at the University of Caen (France), and then became a full professor at the University of Mainz in 2003.

She is the spokes person of the DFG research group "New Materials with High Spin Polarization" and is the director of the DFG graduate school of  Excellence "Materials Science in Mainz" .  In 2001, she was honored with the "Landesverdienstorden" for the foundation of  the Nat-Lab for school students at the University Mainz. Her research interest are solid state science. The design of new materials with specific electronic and magnetic properties is in the focus of her resesearch: "New materials for spintronics and energy technologies." 

• Professor Theo Rasing,Radboud University Nijmegen
• Audio recording (mp3)

Theo Rasing is a full Professor of Experimental Physics, founder and Director of the Nijmegen Center of Advanced Spectroscopy and member of many international advisory boards and committees. In 2007 he received the Physics Price of the Dutch Physics Society and in 2008 he received the Spinoza price, the highest scientific award of the Dutch National Science Foundation.  He is has published over 300 papers, including several in Nature, Science and Physical Review Letters that have been cited over 4000 times. 

• Professor Yoshinori Tokura, University of Tokyo, Japan
• Audio recording (mp3)

Professor Yoshinori Tokura was educated at University of Tokyo (Ph.D., Applied Physics 1981). He was appointed as Associate Professor (1986) and then as Professor (1994) at the Department of Physics, University of Tokyo .  Since 1995, he has been Professor, Department of Applied Physics, University of Tokyo . He is concurrently Group Director of Advance Science Institute, RIKEN, and Project Director for ERATO Tokura Multiferroics Project, JST. His area of interest is in the correlated-electron materials - design and exploration for new interesting electronic properties and functions. 

• Professor Yoshishige Suzuki, Osaka University, Japan
• Audio recording (mp3)

Dr. Yoshishige Suzuki is a Professor at Osaka University in the Graduate School of Engineering Science, Department of Materials Engineering Science. He gained his doctorate in Engineering Science from Tsukuba University.

He has been awarded several prizes including, Best paper award' from the Magnetic Society of Japan in 1988, 2002 and 2005 and Best paper award' from the Japanese Applied Physics Society in 2005 and 2007. He won third prize for Le concours de Tart from the Institut d'Electronique Fondamentale in 1996 and recently received the Japan Prime Minister award' for Industry-University-National Institute cooperation research in 2008. 

• Professor Ian Appelbaum, University of Maryland, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Ian Appelbaum obtained his B.S. summa cum laude in Physics and Mathematics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in December 1997, and Ph.D. in Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in June 2003. After spending one year as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, he became an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Delaware in Fall 2004.

He is now an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park. Dr. Appelbaum is the author or co-author of over 35 peer-reviewed journal papers, recipient of the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER award (2008), and the 2008 Outstanding Junior Faculty Member for the University of Delaware's College of Engineering. 

• Professor Bert Koopmans, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
• Audio recording (mp3)

Bert Koopmans (PhD. 1993, University of Groningen) is group leader of the group Physics of Nanostructures (FNA) at the department of applied physics at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His research interests encompass spintronics (including hybrid semiconductor and molecular devices), nanomagnetism and ultrafast spin dynamics.

He is coordinator of the Eindhoven Center for NanoMaterials (cNM), and is strongly involved with the Dutch NanoTechnology Initiative NanoNed, both as leader of the program NanoSpintronics, as well as representative of TU/e in the board. In 2005 he received a Vici Laureate for a personal program on "Spin Engineering in Molecular Devices" to further develop the field of organic spintronics. 

• Professor Sergei Demokritov, University of Muenster, Germany
• Audio recording (mp3)

Sergej Demokritov was born in Russia. He graduated from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1982 and has got his PhD from Kapitza Institute for Physical Problems, Moscow, where he was working till he moved to Germany in 1993. After spending several years at Forschungszentrum Jülich and University Kaiserslautern he has grounded in 2004 a group of Nonlinear Magnetic Dynamics at Institute for Applied Physics, University Münster, Germany.

During his work in Jülich together with P. Grünberg, he has discovered biquadratic interlayer coupling in magnetic multilayers. His work in Kaiserslautern has been marked by observation of spin wave quantization, spin wave well effect and spin wave tunnelling in magnetic nanoelements. His research team in Münster studies the nonlinear magnetic dynamics and quantum thermodynamics in magnetic nanostructures. 

• Professor Shoucheng Zhang, Stanford University, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Professor Zhang is a Professor of Physics, Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He received his masters degree at the Free University of Berlin in 1983, and the Ph.D. degree at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1987. He spent four years as a senior research staff member at IBM. There he was awarded the Outstanding Innovation Award by the IBM Corp. for his distinguished research in semiconductor physics.

He joined the faculty at the Physics Department of Stanford in 1993. Prof. Zhang is the co-director of the IBM-Stanford center for spintronics. Professor Zhang has published 160 papers including 10 in Science and 6 in Nature and Nature Physics. He received the Guggenheim fellowship award and the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society. His work on the theoretical prediction of the quantum spin Hall effect was ranked by Science as one of the top ten breakthroughs among all sciences in 2007.   

• Professor Daniel Loss, University of Basel, Switzerland
• Audio recording (mp3)

Professor Daniel Loss received his Diploma (1983) and Ph.D. (1985) in theoretical physics at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. From 1989 to 1991 he worked as a postdoc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with A. J. Leggett, and from 1991 to 1993 at IBM Watson Research Center. In 1993 he joined the faculty of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and then returned to Switzerland in 1996 to hold a chair in Theoretical Physics at the University of Basel.

His research field is the quantum theory of condensed matter and includes spin- and phase-coherent phenomena in semiconducting and magnetic nanostructures and quantum information science. In 2000 he became an APS Fellow and in 2005 he received the Humboldt Research Prize. Professor Loss is currently chair of the department of physics, director of the Basel Center for Quantum Computing and Quantum Coherence (QC2), and co-director of the Swiss National Center of Competence and Research (NCCR) in Nanoscale Science.