Visiting Fellowship for Professor A. Taraphder: Theory of magnetism with temporal disorder applied to magnetically doped ZnO

我们需要了解一类新的磁性材料，磁性半导体，因为它们在一门名为自旋电子学的新学科中具有非常高的潜力。这些材料既具有半导体处理数据的功能，又具有存储数据的磁性。添加少量过渡金属的基于氧化锌的化合物特别有希望，因为它们在室温下是铁磁性的。但有一个主要的谜题：有时当添加更多杂质时，磁性会增强，有时磁性会消失。在这个项目中，我们将研究是否有一种特定的机制来实现这一点。了解磁铁的这一方面将是朝着优化它们用于自旋电子学设备的方向迈出的非常重要的一步。该项目将把一位优秀的印度物理学家塔拉弗德教授带到谢菲尔德，与致力于氧化锌研究的主要英国小组的领导人合作，以解决这个问题。

We need to understand a new class of magnetic materials, magnetic semiconductors, because they have a very high potential in a new subject called spintronics. These materials have the potential to perform both the functions of a semiconductor to process data and a magnetic to store the data.The particular class of compounds based ZnO with a small amount of a transition metal added is particularly promising because they are ferromagnetic at room temperature.However there is a major puzzle: sometimes the magnetism is enhanced when more impurities are added and sometimes the magnetism goes away.In this project we shall investigate if a particular mechanism for this is valid. Understanding this aspect of the magnets will be a very important step towards being able to optimise them for use in spintronics devices. This project is to bring an excellent Indian physicist, Professor Taraphder, to Sheffield to work with the leader of the main UK group working on ZnO in order to solve this problem.