Half-metallic ferromagnets
This is the home page for a new collaborative project to study thin film half-metallic ferromagnetic (HMF) materials. An ideal HMF has 100% spin polarisation at the Fermi level, i.e. for one electron spin channel it is a semiconductor while the other spin channel behaves like a metal. However, real HMFs in the form needed for spintronic devices are far from ideal! We are studying 3 classes of HMF material in thin-film form, aiming to understand and fix the sources of the non-ideal HMF behaviour. Increasing the effective spin polarisation at room temperature will help us to improve the performance of spintronic devices, which could form the basis of a new generation of low-energy data storage and processing components.
Our work is supported by EPSRC via the project Half-metallic ferromagnets: materials fundamentals for next-generation spintronics. The collaboration is principally between the Physics Departments of Warwick and York Universities, with partners including Toshiba Research Europe Ltd., Diamond Light Source and Synchrotron Soleil.
Academic team - Warwick
Dr. Gavin Bell (these pages), Professor Julie Staunton, Dr. Ana Sanchez, Dr. Tom Hase
Academic team - York
Dr. Vlado Lazarov, Dr. Atsufumi Hirohata, Dr. Keith McKenna
Research Fellows
Dr. Chris Burrows (Warwick), Dr. Leonardo Lari (York & JEOL Nanocentre)
PhD Students (Warwick)
Stephanie Glover, Philip Mousley (Warwick and Diamond Light Source), Collins Ouserigha, Haiyuan Wang, Alifah Ab Rahman (all members of the Surface, Interface & Thin Film Group)
What are half-metallic ferromagnetic materials?
papers & talks & posters
facility time
Experimental techniques: TEM/STEM, ARPES, XPS, MBE, etc.